"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."

"After that, going public with a clue became known as “pulling a Pendergast"."

"And then it finally happened. Right while I was sitting there daydreaming in Latin class."

"For the first time, I knew what is was to be a natural at something. To have a gift."

"The OASIS —it’s the greatest videogame ever created, and it only costs a quarter."

"And that was when it hit me. Like an anvil falling out of the sky, directly on my skull."

"You’d be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever."

"Gunters who wanted help joined a clan, and Aech and I both agreed that clans were for suck-asses and poseurs."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"For years hunters had speculated that Anorak still roamed the OASIS, now as an autonomous NPC. Halliday’s ghost in the machine."

"Being human totally sucks most of the time."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"You look like a low-level wimpazoid to me, Juan Ramírez. And I think you’re hiding something."

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

"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."

"Jonas felt a ripping sensation inside."

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

"Your father means that you used a very generalized word, so meaningless that it has become almost obsolete, his mother explained carefully."

"Jonas stared at them. Meaningless? He had never before felt anything as meaningful as the memory."

"What do you mean? Jonas asked. Amusement was not at all what he had anticipated."

"Do you love me?"

"Things could change, Gabe," Jonas went on. "Things could be different. I don't know how, but there must be some way for things to be different."

"There was an awkward silence for a moment. Then Father gave a little chuckle. "Jonas. You, of all people. Precision of language, please!""

"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."

"I liked the feeling of love," [Jonas] confessed. He glanced nervously at the speaker on the wall, reassuring himself that no one was listening. "I wish we still had that," he whispered. "Of course," he added quickly, "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, almost to himself, "I did like the light they made. And the warmth.""

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

"But now Jonas had experienced real sadness. He had felt grief. He knew that there was no quick comfort for emotions like those."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"It was a game he had often played with the other children, a game of good guys and bad guys, a harmless pasttime that used up their contained energy and ended only when they all lay posed in freakish postures on the round. He had never recognized it before as a game of war."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."