Delwyth, Bethan, and Eira be their names – I midwifed each one, same year.
My work will be finished when I have helped the community to change and become whole.
They sat silently for a moment.
He sat in his dwelling alone, watching through the window, seeing children at play, citizens bicycling home from uneventful days at work, ordinary lives free of anguish because he had been selected, as others before him had, to bear their burden.
The exemption from rudeness startled him. Reading it again, however, he realized that it didn’t compel him to be rude; it simply allowed him the option.
Its a little like looking at yourself looking in a mirror looking at yourself looking in a mirror.
A book, to me, is almost sacrosanct: such an individual and private thing. The reader brings his or her own history and beliefs and concerns, and reads in solitude, creating each scene from his own imagination as he does.
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.