"A lot of kids owned their own interplanetary vehicles. School parking lots all over Ludus were filled with UFOs, TIE fighters, old NASA space shuttles, Vipers from Battlestar Galactica, and other spacecraft designs lifted from every sci-fi movie and TV show you can think of."

"The Great Recession was now entering its third decade, and unemployment was still at a record high. Even the fast-food joints in my neighborhood had a two-year waiting list for job applicants."

"Regardless, you’re a fellow hunter. And a clever one too, or you wouldn’t be standing here."

"Dude, you have balls of solid adamantium," Aech said. "Respect."

"Some time later, she leaned over and kissed me. It felt just like all those songs and poems had promised it would. It felt wonderful. Like being struck by lightning."

"Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest."

"We don't need a map because where we are going, there is no map"

"At first, these individuals were known simply as "egg hunters," but this was quickly truncated to the nickname "gunters.""

"Being human totally sucks most of the time."

"No giant two-headed hermaphrodite demon unicorn avatars were allowed. Not on school grounds, anyway."

"For me, growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth. Existentially speaking."

"Videogames are the only thing that make life bearable."

"The van was my refuge. My Batcave. My Fortress of Solitude."

"These three words were always the last thing an OASIS user saw before leaving the real world and entering the virtual one:"

"They have never known pain, he thought. The realization made him feel desperately lonely."

"The agony of the fractured leg began to seem no more than a mild discomfort as The Giver led Jonas firmly, little by little, in the deep and terrible suffering of the past."

"Overwhelmed by pain, he lay there in the fearsome stench for hours, listened to the men and animals die, and learned what warfare meant."

"Jonas did not want to go back. He did not want the memories, didn't want the honor, didn't want the wisdom, didn't want the pain. He wanted his childhood again, his scraped knees and ball games. 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. But the choice was not his. He returned each day to the Annex room."

"If everything's the same, then there aren't any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and decide things!"

"It's the choosing that's important, isn't it?"

"We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others."

"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."

"There's much more. There's all that goes beyond—all that is Elsewhere—and all that goes back, and back, and back. I received all of those, when I was selected. And here in this room, all alone, I re-experience them again and again. It is how wisdom comes. And how we shape our future."

"Honor," he said firmly. "I have great honor. So will you. But you will find that is not the same as power."

"My Instructors in science and technology have taught us about how the brain works," Jonas told him eagerly. "It's full of electrical impulses. It's like a computer. If you stimulate one part of the brain with an electrode, it-"’ He stopped talking. He could see an odd look on The Giver’s face. "They know nothing."

"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 today we honor your differences.They have determined your future."

"But at the same time he was filled with fear. He did not know what his selection meant. He did not know what he was to become. Or what would become of him."

"It didn't worry him. How could someone not fit in? The community was so meticulously ordered, the choices so carefully made."

"His mind reeled. Now, empowered to ask questions of utmost rudeness-and promised answers-he could, conceivably (though it was almost unimaginable), ask someone, some adult, his father perhaps: "Do you lie?" But he would have no way of knowing if the answer he received was true."

"Jonas tried to be brave. He remembered that the Chief Elder had said he was brave."

"There are so many good memories, The Giver reminded Jonas."

"The Old were always given the highest respect."

"His feelings were too complicated this evening. He wanted to shared them, but wasn’t eager to begin the process of sifting through his own complicated emotions, even with the help that he knew his parents could give."

"No one mentioned such things; it was not a rule, but was considered rude to call attention to things that were unsettling or different about individuals."

"Better to steer clear of an occasion governed by a rule which would be so easy to break."

"He had walked through woods, and sat at night beside a campfire. Although he had through the memories learned about the pain of loss and loneliness, now he gained, too, an understanding of solitude and its joy."

"In one ecstatic memory he had ridden a gleaming brown horse across a field that smelled of damp grass, and had dismounted beside a small stream from which both he and the horse drank cold, clear water. Now he understood about animals; and in the moment that the horse turned from the stream and nudged Jonas's shoulder affectionately with its head, he perceived the bonds between animal and human."

"It was not safe to spend time looking back."

"Jonas felt a ripping sensation inside."

"The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared."

"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. But perhaps, it was only an echo."