Back and back and back.” Jonas repeated the familiar phrase. Sometimes it had seemed humorous to him. Sometimes it had seemed meaningful and important. Now it was ominous. It meant, he knew, that nothing could be changed.
I am the Fiercest of the Fierce.
You have the colors,” The Giver told him. “And you have the courage. I will help you to have the strength.
For Kirsti, the soldiers were simply part of the landscape, something.
You can stand at the edge of the meadow and look across to Sweden!
But the aircraft a year ago had been different. It was not a squat, fat-bellied cargo plane but a needle-nosed single-pilot jet.
He was left, upon awakening, with the feeling that he wanted, even somehow needed, to reach the something that waited in the distance. The feeling that it was good. That it was welcoming. That it was significant. But he did not know how to get there.
For me? The very first time I saw beyond? It was an apple.
A teenage girl wrote that she had been considering suicide until she read The Giver.
Two children – one male, one female – to each family unit.
Artist?” Thomas suggested. “That’s a word. I’ve never heard anyone say it, but I’ve read it in some of the books. It means, well, someone who is able to make something beautiful. Would that be the word?
I am teaching this one new habits,” Kirsti explained importantly. “And I have named him Thor, for the God of Thunder.
I mean, I wish I knew the right things to say to people. Sometimes I seem to just sit there.
Elderberry,” the old woman told her.
They were arranged by their original numbers, the numbers they had been given at birth. The numbers were rarely used after the Naming. But each child knew his number, of course. Sometimes parents used them in irritation at a child’s misbehavior, indicating that mischief made one unworthy of a name. Jonas always chuckled when he heard a parent, exasperated, call sharply to a whining toddler, ″That’s enough, Twenty-three!
Maybe it is something that artists have,” she said, liking the sound of the word she had just learned. “A special kind of magic knowledge.
Don’t ever be sorry for that. Weren’t we lucky that Papa thought so quickly and found the pictures? And weren’t we lucky that Lise had dark hair when she was a baby? It turned blond later on, when she was two or so.” “In between,” Papa added, “she was bald for a while!” Ellen and Annemarie both smiled tentatively. For a moment their fear was eased.
I guess the important thing is also the simplest. To acknowledge our connectedness on this earth, to bow our heads when we see a scorched bicycle or a child’s message to his lost grandpa and to honor the past by making silent promises to our fellow humans that we will work for a better and more peaceful future.
Be one of many. Be sure that they never have reason to remember your face.
Annemarie admitted to herself, snuggling there in the quiet dark, that she was glad to be an ordinary person who would never be called upon for courage.