Lois Lowry Quotes

There are nice things in the world - and I mean nice things. We're all such morons to get so sidetracked.

I always had a feeling when I was a kid that I didn't really know what was going on. Everybody else knew stuff that I didn't know.

I liked things better when I didn't understand them.

… the idiocy of rural life

What is the alternative to understanding the complexity of the world?

The world, right now, is only us.

They were so ignorant, so naive, so resigned to their lot. They refused to believe anything that didn't fit in with what they were used to believing.

The highest form of bliss is living with a certain degree of folly

You mortals are like fish swimming in a globe of glass. That globe is your world. You do not see beyond it.

In my situation, frankly, I'm a bit institutionalised - this [the embassy] is the world .. it's visually the world [for me].

Economic man and the Calvinist Christian sing to each other like voices in a fugue. The Calvinist stands alone before an almost merciless God; no human agency can help him; his church is a means to political and social organization rather than a bridge to deity, for no priest can have greater knowledge of the divine way than he himself; no friend can console him - in fact, he should distrust all men; in the same fashion, Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's.

You don't know what's coming for you in life, and you don't know what's around the corner. When you're in a great deal of pain, you're only imagining your world the way it is.

This world, where much is to be done and little to be known.

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.

Somebody else's ignorance is bliss.

There is only one world the world pressing against you this minute.

What I mean by living to one's self is living in the world, as in it, not of it.

The innocence which is simply ignorance is not virtue.

He's Black Council," I said. "Or maybe stupid," Ebenezar countered. I thought about it. "Not sure which is scarier." Ebenezar blinked at me, then snorted. "Stupid, Hoss. Every time. Only so many blackhearted villains in the world, and they only get uppity on occasion. Stupid's everywhere, every day.

As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period of my life; I mean that I had some.

I don't work so hard at trying to get every song to be three-dimensional and mean so much. I just want to breathe, right now, with the music.

We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war.

One of the sad things, I think, about the younger generation, quite frankly, is they have less sense of yesterday. And if you don't know who you were, you don't really know who you are.

But what could I do? Be stupid for a while? I wasn't sure I knew how, even after so many years of careful observation.

People are naive about such things, and they would rather write them off as evil than attempt to understand them. An unfortunate truth, but a truth nonetheless.