If everyting's the same, then there aren't any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and decide things!" (Jonas) "It's the choosing that's imortant, isn't it?" The Giver asked him.

Then I went home to continue my life, which had changed a little, as lives do every day, inching by microspecks forward toward whatever surprises are coming next.

I see all of them. All the colors.

So many of my books, I don't want to say they have messages, but they have important things to say.

I have learned over the course of my many years that it is a bad idea, usually, to investigate piteous weeping but always a fine thing to look into a giggle.

She was the only doctor's wife in Branford, Maine, who hung her wash on an outdoor clothesline instead of putting it through a dryer, because she liked to look out the window and see the clothes blowing in the wind. She had been especially delighted, one day, when one sleeve of the top of her husband's pajamas, prodded by the stiff breeze off the bay, reached over and grabbed her nightgown around the waist.

I was a sidelines child: never class president, never team captain, never the one with the most valentines in my box.