We live in times that are in many ways ambiguous. Maybe that's why kids want precision in what they read - they don't like that moral ambiguity.

You eat canned tuna fish and you absorb protein. Then, if you're lucky, someone give you Dover Sole and you experience nourishment. It's the same with books.

The whole world had changed. Only the fairy tales remained the same. "And they lived happily ever after.

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]

Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps the singing bird will come.

When I wrote 'The Giver,' it contained no so-called 'bad words.' It was set, after all, in a mythical, futuristic, and Utopian society. Not only was there no poverty, divorce, racism, sexism, pollution, or violence in the world of 'The Giver'; there was also careful attention paid to language: to its fluency, precision, and power.

It is much easier to be brave if you do not know everything.