The community of the Giver had achieved at such great price. A community without danger or pain. But also, a community without music, color or art. And books.

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.

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

Today is declared an unscheduled holiday.

So actually, there could be parents-of-the-parents-of-the-parents-of-the parents?

I make up the characters in my books, but of course my consciousness is filled with every child I've ever known, including my two grandchildren, my own kids (I had four) and especially myself as a child, because that person still lives inside me, too.

...now he saw the familiar wide river beside the path differently. He saw all of the light and color and history it contained and carried in its slow - moving water; and he knew that there was an Elsewhere from which it came, and an Elsewhere to which it was going