Gathering Blue’ was a separate book. I wanted to explore what a society might become after a catastrophic world event. Only at the end did I realize I could make it connect to ‘The Giver.
I left home at the correct time but when I was riding along near the hatchery, the crew was separating some salmon, I guess I just got distraught, watching them.
I don’t know what she is now. A stranger, mostly. It’s as if she has become a part of a different world, one that doesn’t include me anymore...
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.
Sometimes I wish they’d ask for my wisdom more often – there are so many things I could tell them; things I wish they would change. But they don’t want change. Life here is so orderly, so predictable – so painless. It’s what they’ve chosen.
And it was lonely, to yearn, all alone.
It be better, I think, to climb out in search of something, instead of hating, what you’re leaving.
I feel sorry for anyone who is in a place where he feels strange and stupid.
And they are beginning to realize that the world they live in is a place where the right thing is often hard, sometimes dangerous, and frequently unpopular.
When people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong, every single time.
Now he saw another elephant emerge from the place where it had stood hidden in the trees. Very slowly it walked to the mutilated body and looked down. With its sinuous trunk it struck the huge corpse; then it reached up, broke some leafy branches with a snap, and draped them over the mass of torn thick flesh. Finally it tilted its massive head, raised its trunk, and roared into the empty landscape.
Pretending doesn’t keep you safe.
The whole world had changed. Only the fairy tales remained the same.
Thank you for your childhood.
He found that he was often angry, now: irrationally angry at his groupmates, that they were satisfied with their lives which had none of the vibrance his own was taking on. And he was angry at himself, that he could not change that for them.
Outside, she knew, the sky was speckled with stars. How could anyone number them one by one, as the psalm said? There were too many. The sky was too big.
It was terrifying, almost unbelievable, the casualness of the cruelty.
But their shoulders were as straight as they had been in the past: in the classroom, on the stage, at the Sabbath table. So there were other sources, too, of pride, and they had not left everything behind.
That’s all that brave means – not thinking about the dangers. Just thinking about what you must do. Of course you were frightened. I was too, today. But you kept your mind on what you had to do.
It’s hard to leave the only place you’ve known.