The Giver Quartet Quotes

The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.

Take pride in your pain,” her mother had always told her. “You are stronger than those who have none.

He saw Forest and understood what Seer had meant. It was an illusion. It was a tangled knot of fears and deceits and dark struggles for power that had disguised itself and almost destroyed everything.

JONAS DID NOT want to go back. He didn’t want the memories, didn’t want the honor, didn’t want the wisdom, didn’t want the pain. He wanted his childhood again, his scraped knees and ball games.

He might make wrong choices.” “Oh.” Jonas was silent for a minute. “Oh, I see what you mean. It wouldn’t matter for a newchild’s toy. But later it does matter, doesn’t it? We don’t dare to let people make choices of their own.” “Not safe?” The Giver suggested. “Definitely not safe,” Jonas said with certainty. “What if they were allowed to choose their own mate? And chose wrong? “Or what if,” he went on, almost laughing at the absurdity, “they chose their own jobs?” “Frightening, isn’t it?” The Giver said. Jonas chuckled. “Very frightening. I can’t even imagine it. We really have to protect people from wrong choices.” “It’s safer.” “Yes,” Jonas agreed. “Much safer.

Over the many years since The Giver was published in 1993, I have received countless, probably thousands, letters and emails from readers. So many of them asked what had happened to the boy, Jonas, and the baby, Gabriel. I had left the ending ambiguous on purpose; I liked the mystery of it, the opportunity for the reader to ponder and decide. But I, too, was pondering. In 2000, seven years later, the companion volume Gathering Blue appeared, revealing that Jonas (he wasn’t named, but young readers identified the teenaged boy with blue eyes easily) was thriving in another community. Four years after that, in Messenger, they were able to meet him as a young man now leading the small village where he lived. “But where’s Gabriel?” kids asked me, almost wailing, and I told them to go back and read chapter two more carefully. There they would find an eight-year-old named Gabe staying after school because he had been inattentive. Finally, in the fourth and final book of the quartet, Son, published in 2012, the now teenaged Gabe moved to center stage, finding his own place in the world—helping, in fact, to change that world. So the question of “What happened to . . .” was put to rest.

Twenty years? No kidding: twenty years? It’s hard to believe. Twenty years ago, I was—well, I was much younger. My parents were still alive. Two of my grandchildren had not yet been born, and another one, now in college, was an infant. Twenty years ago I didn’t own a cell phone. I didn’t know what quinoa was and I doubt if I had ever tasted kale. There had recently been a war. Now we refer to that one as the First Gulf War, but back then, mercifully, we didn’t know there would be another. Maybe a lot of us weren’t even thinking about the future then. But I was. And I’m a writer. I wrote The Giver on a big machine that had recently taken the place of my much-loved typewriter, and after I printed the pages, very noisily, I had to tear them apart, one by one, at the perforated edges. (When I referred to it as my computer, someone more knowledgeable pointed out that my machine was not a computer. It was a dedicated word processor. “Oh, okay then,” I said, as if I understood the difference.) As I carefully separated those two hundred or so pages, I glanced again at the words on them. I could see that I had written a complete book. It had all the elements of the seventeen or so books I had written before, the same things students of writing list on school quizzes: characters, plot, setting, tension, climax. (Though I didn’t reply as he had hoped to a student who emailed me some years later with the request “Please list all the similes and metaphors in The Giver,” I’m sure it contained those as well.) I had typed THE END after the intentionally ambiguous final paragraphs. But I was aware that this book was different from the many I had already written. My editor, when I gave him the manuscript, realized the same thing. If I had drawn a cartoon of him reading those pages, it would have had a text balloon over his head. The text would have said, simply: Gulp. But that was twenty years ago. If I had written The Giver this year, there would have been no gulp. Maybe a yawn, at most. Ho-hum. In so many recent dystopian novels (and there are exactly that: so many), societies battle and characters die hideously and whole civilizations crumble. None of that in The Giver. It was introspective. Quiet. Short on action. “Introspective, quiet, and short on action” translates to “tough to film.” Katniss Everdeen gets to kill off countless adolescent competitors in various ways during The Hunger Games; that’s exciting movie fare. It sells popcorn. Jonas, riding a bike and musing about his future? Not so much. Although the film rights to The Giver were snapped up early on, it moved forward in spurts and stops for years, as screenplay after screenplay—none of them by me—was

But suddenly Jonas had noticed, following the path of the apple through the air with his eyes, that the piece of fruit had—well, this was the part that he couldn’t adequately understand—the apple had changed. Just for an instant. It had changed in mid-air, he remembered. Then it was in his hand, and he looked at it carefully, but it was the same apple. Unchanged. The same size and shape: a perfect sphere. The same nondescript shade, about the same shade as his own tunic. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about that apple. He had tossed it back and forth between his hands a few times, then thrown it again to Asher. And again—in the air, for an instant only—it had changed.

Actually,” the chief guardian said in a calm voice, “you have no rights at all. But I am going to tell you the decision so that there will be no misunderstanding. “The orphan girl Kira will stay. She will have a new role.” He gestured toward the Singer’s robe, still spread out on the table. “Kira,” he said, looking at her, “you will continue your mother’s work. You will go beyond her work, actually, since your skill is far greater than hers was. First, you will repair the robe, as your mother always did. Next, you will restore it. Then your true work will begin. You will complete the robe.

Selected for what?” Claire had never heard of such a thing before. Rolf raised an eyebrow and shrugged. “I don’t know.” “Didn’t she say?” “Yes, but I didn’t understand what she was talking about. Did any of you?” He looked around at his coworkers at the table. “Not really,” Edith said. “It was important, though. It had to do with the Giver and the Receiver.” “Whoever they are,” someone murmured. “Yes, it sounded really important,” Eric agreed.

There were more than usual this time. “It’s a big group,” Matty whispered to the blind man. “Yes, I can hear that it is. I wonder if somehow they have begun to hear rumors that we may close.

She turned her eyes away quickly so that she would not learn it, would not be guilty of something clearly forbidden to her. But it made her smile, to see it, to see how the pen formed the shapes and the shapes told a story of a name.

Is there something wrong with your shoes?” he asked,

In the new light, Gabe could see that the weapons had changed. They were broken toys, bits of rusted tin, as if a careless child had left them out in the rain.

No. But why would I go back? I had found a home here, the way everyone has. That’s why we have the Museum, Matty, to remind us of how we came, and why: to start fresh, and begin a new place from what we had learned and carried from the old.

I cooked for him like a wife and washed his clothes and was a wife in other ways too terrible to mention.

He’s changing, isn’t he?” Matty replied, startling himself, because he had not spelled it out in his mind before, had not said it aloud yet, yet here it was, and he was saying it to Jean. He felt an odd sense of relief. Jean began to cry softly. “Yes,” she said. “He has traded his deepest self.

Some say it eases pain to lay a knife beneath the bed.” “Is it true?” Alsy shrugged. “Likely not. But if the person thinks it, then the thinking eases the pain.

The cold rain continued to fall. He remembered, suddenly, how Jean’s hair curled and framed her face when it was damp. In contrast to the horrible stench that was growing stronger by the minute, he remembered the fragrance of her when she had kissed him goodbye. It seemed so long ago.

They spoke of the history of Village, how each of them there had fled poverty and cruelty and been welcomed at this new place that had taken them in.