Lois Lowry Quotes
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Oddly, the military world is one of great sameness. There is an orderly quality to life on an army base, and even the children of the military are brought up with that sense of order and sameness.
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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.
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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.
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I often compare myself as a kid to my own grandchildren, who are around 11 and 14 now. That's the age kids usually read my book. And I remember myself; we'd gone through a world war. My father was an army officer so I was aware of what was going on. But I wasn't bombarded with images of catastrophe like many kids are today.
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When I moved from Cambridge, I donated all my fiction. I carefully cut out pages the authors had autographed for me. I didn't want those autographed books showing up on eBay.
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Pretending that there are no choices to be made - reading only books, for example, which are cheery and safe and nice - is a prescription for disaster for the young.
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As female hormones decrease, they're replaced with an overwhelming urge to grow delphinium.
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Most people remember being 4 objectively, as if they're seeing a movie of a 4-year-old. But me, if you ask me to think about when I'm 4, I can feel myself being 4, and I am there, looking out through my 4-year-old eyes.
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People are starting to refer to 'The Giver' as a classic, but I don't know how that is defined. But if it means that 10, 20, 50 years from now kids will still be reading it, that is kind of awe-inspiring.
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I think 'The Giver' is such a moral book, so filled with important truths, that I couldn't believe anyone would want to suppress it, to keep it from kids.
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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.
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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.
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Often in the past, there have been authors that were deeply disappointed in their adaptation, but that's because they haven't accepted the fact that a movie is a different thing, and it can't possibly be the same as the book.
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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.
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People can lie in letters, but they tend not to. They certainly lie in memoirs.
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People in the know say 'The Giver' was the first young adult dystopian novel.
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I majored in English in college, so I read the classic dystopian novels like '1984' and 'Brave New World.'
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I'm not terribly conversant with children's literature in general. I tend to read books for adults, being an adult.
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If we as writers could predict what readers grab on to, we would write it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There will always be a place for bunnies to talk in rhyme, but that's not what I do.
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'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.'