I didn’t reply as he had hoped to a student who emailed me some years later, with the request Please list all the similes and metaphors in The Giver, I’m sure it contained those as well.)
He saw nothing except the endless ribbon of road unfolding in twisting narrow curves.
He knew that there was no quick comfort for emotions like those. They were deeper and they did not need to be told. They were felt.
He could feel the little head nudge his back, bouncing gently against him as he rode. Gabriel was sleeping soundly, strapped into the seat. Before he had left the dwelling, he had laid his hånds firml...
Four
For the first time, he heard something that he knew to be music. He heard people singing. Behind him, across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had left, he thought he heard music too...
For a contributing citizen to be released from the community was a final decision, a terrible punishment, an overwhelming statement of failure.
For Kirsti, the soldiers were simply part of the landscape, something
Father? Mother? Jonas asked tentatively after the evening meal. I have a question I want to ask you. What is it, Jonas? his father asked. He made himself say the words, though he felt flushed with emb...
Ellen had said that her mother was frightened of the ocean, that it was too cold and too big. The sky was, too, thought Annemarie. The whole world was: too cold, too big. And too cruel.
DAYS WENT BY, and weeks. Jonas learned, through the memories, the names of colors; and now he began to see them all, in his ordinary life (though he knew it was ordinary no longer, and would never be...
But the bicycle stopped. It would not move. He got off and let it drop sideways into thesnow. For a moment he thought how easy it would be to drop beside it himself, to let himself and Gabriel slide i...
Author
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?
Alys told her that it was the way of women, to tote a newborn and then adjust as it grew until by the time the child was plump and heavy, the weight seemed naught.
Always better, less rude, to talk about things that were the same.
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.
Each change, painful though some of them will be, will make us a little better than we were before.
Dogs
Children all received their bicycles at Nine; they were not allowed to ride bicycles before then.