There will always be a place for bunnies to talk in rhyme, but that's not what I do.

The mind can’t explain it, and you can’t make it go away. It’s called love.

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.

Things seem more when you’re little. They seem bigger, and distances seem farther.

There's much more. There's all that goes beyond – all ... that is Elsewhere – and all that goes back, and back, and back. I received all of those, when I was selected. And here in this room, all alone, I re-experience them again and again. It is how wisdom comes. And how we shape our future.

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.

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.