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.

Making lists of reasons was sometimes a good way to figure things out.

-a whole world can lie before someone, if love is there when one wakes.

I turn to books for a feeling of companionship: for somebody knowing what I have known.

The man that I named the Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things. [from her Newberry Award acceptance speech]

Reading is the most important way to prepare for life.

Gabe?" The newchild stirred slightly in his sleep. Jonas looked over at him. "There could be love", Jonas whispered.