Words matter. These are the best Lois Lowry Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I was fortunate to live for 3 years in another country, and although we lived in an American compound, still as a young adolescent I did venture into the world of the Japanese with great interest and enjoyment. But many Americans never left that safe and familiar life among their own people.
The grand surprise has really been the fact that being an author, which to me had always implied being a private person, actually requires you to be a public person as well, and those are two separate entities to me.
When I was a kid in the ’50s, during the Eisenhower years, everything seemed to be working fine. I don’t recall as a teenager ever worrying about the state of the future world.
People do things that turn out badly, often for the most benevolent of reasons.
When I create characters, I create a world to inhabit and they begin to feel very real for me. I don’t belong in a psych ward, I don’t think, but they become very real, like my own family, and then I have to say goodbye, close the door, and work on other things.
I believe without a single shadow of a doubt that it is necessary for young people to learn to make choices. Learning to make right choices is the only way they will survive in an increasingly frightening world.
I think when you’ve had success, publishers and reviewers and readers are willing to let you try something new if you’ve already proven yourself. They’re excited about what you’re doing, you have people interested in it, and actually waiting for it. It’s empowering.
I was a sidelines child: never class president, never team captain, never the one with the most valentines in my box.
Nowadays it seems as though people sit down to write what they know is going to be a trilogy.
Many of the books I loved as a kid, that even my mother read as a child, are very slow going. Today’s children are not as patient. The best example of this is ‘The Secret Garden,’ which I adored as a child.
I have been fortunate. I have done so many things and enjoyed so many things and had such a great life, not to imply that it is ending, but that there aren’t many things that I feel I have left undone.
I’m a writer; I like to retain subtlety and nuance.
I majored in English in college, so I read the classic dystopian novels like ‘1984’ and ‘Brave New World.’
It’s interesting that so many books now are published as the first in a series. It never occurred to me. Although ‘The Giver’ does have an ambiguous ending. I’ve heard about that from readers over the years.
Writing is self employment, so you can make your own schedule.
If somebody takes the time, a: to read a book that I have written, and then to b: care about it enough to write me and ask questions, surely I owe them a response.
I prefer to surprise myself as I’m writing. I’m not interested in it if I already know where it’s going. So I have only the most general sense of what I’m doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.
This may sound strange, but at a very early age, at around 3, I was aware that I was smarter than the other kids.
I don’t read young adult or children’s books, now that my grandchildren are beyond the age of my reading to them. I read reviews, and so I’m aware of what’s out there. But I tend not to read the books.
The fact that I lost my son permeates my being.
People in the know say ‘The Giver’ was the first young adult dystopian novel.
Because I have two houses, I invariably get immersed in a book and then discover it’s at the other house.
I’m not terribly conversant with children’s literature in general. I tend to read books for adults, being an adult.
As female hormones decrease, they’re replaced with an overwhelming urge to grow delphinium.
I always set out to tell a good story, to create a character that young people can relate to, place them in a situation that will be interesting, intriguing, eventually suspenseful. But what I find is that after I do that, then there are themes that emerge, which teachers can then use to provoke discussion and debate.
One hopes that with a book or movie, the reader or the audience will emerge from it thinking. That’s the most you can hope for: that you’ve raised questions that will be there for the audience to think about later.
I think I’ve written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I’m an introspective person.
‘Gathering Blue’ was a separate book. I wanted to explore what a society might become after a catastrophic world event. Only at the end did I realize I could make it connect to ‘The Giver.’
When you lose a child in an accident as I did, it’s final – you’re not caught in this longing for him, to search for him, knowing he’s out there some place.
If we as writers could predict what readers grab on to, we would write it.
In 1952, when I was 15 and living on Governors Island, which was then First Army Headquarters, I encountered the newly-published ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’ Of course, that book became the iconic anti-establishment novel for my generation.
I’ve always been interested in medicine and was pleased when my brother became a doctor. But after thinking seriously about that field, I realized that what intrigued me was not the science, not the chemistry or biology of medicine, but the narrative – the story of each patient, each illness.
I tend not to think about audience when I’m writing. Many people who read ‘The Giver’ now have their own kids who are reading it. Even from the beginning, the book attracted an audience beyond a child audience.
