Why do you and I have to hold these memories? It gives us wisdom, The Giver replied.
Well..., Jonas had to stop and think it through. If everything's the same, then there are no choices! I want to wake up in the morning and DECIDE things! A blue tunic, or a red one?
We are four worthy orphans with a no-nonsense nanny.Like Mary Poppins? suggested the man, with a pleased look of recognition.Not like that fly-by-night woman, Nanny said with a sniff. It almost gives...
Thomas, she suggested, you and I? We're the ones who will fill in the blank places. Maybe we can make it different.
There are only three weeks left, Matty. After the border closes it will be too late. She won't be allowed to come. You must bring her here before that happens.If you don't, Matty, I will never see her...
The sky was, too, thought Annemarie. The whole world was: too cold, too big. And too cruel.
The next morning, for the first time, Jonas did not take his pill. Something within him, something that had grown there through the memories, told him to throw the pill away.
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
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.
The Willoughby parents frequently forgot that they had children and became quite irritable when they were reminded of it.
Take pride in your pain, her mother had always told her. You are stronger than those who have none. She
Sometimes he awoke with a feeling of fragments afloat in his sleep, but he couldn't seem to grasp them and put them together into something worthy of telling at the ritual.
She had seen the cindered fragments of her childhood life whirl into the sky as well.
Put your hands on me, he directed, aware that in such anguish The Giver might need reminding. The hands came, and the pain came with them and through them.
Jonas: 'I do understand that it wouldn't work very well. And that it's much better to be organized the way we are now. I can see that it was a dangerous way to live.' ...'Still,' he said slowly, almos...
JONAS RECEIVER OF MEMORY Go immediately at the end of school hours each day to the Annex entrance behind the House of the Old and present yourself to the attendant. Go immediately to your dwelling at...
He saw Forest and understood what Seer had meant. It was an illusion. It was a tangled knot of fears and deceits and dark struggles for power that had disguised itself and almost destroyed everything....
Finally he steeled himself to read the final rule again. He had been trained since earliest childhood, since his earliest learning of language, never to lie. It was an integral part of the learning of...
At dawn, the orderly, disciplined life he had always known would continue again, without him. The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without color, pain, or...
And he could see as well that they had not yet approached the worst of it.