Lois Lowry Quotes

I'd say my mother made more of a difference to me than anyone else did. I know that's a conventional and perhaps mundane answer, but my family was blown apart at the start of World War II.

The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.

I am, as it happens, a baby boomer, but not one who feels any broad-gauge nostalgia for the '60s and '70s. My attitude resembles that of my parents, who were born in the '20s and lived through the Great Depression and World War II.

I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married.

I grew up in a family full of strong women. A great aunt on my mother's side had been a matron on a hospital ship in World War II, and one on my father's side had served in the Women's Royal Naval Service.

I'm a big supporter of the military simply because I'm the daughter of a Polish immigrant who fled Europe during World War II from Poland and lied about his age to join the Army simply because he was proud to be an American. And who isn't?

And having suffered for part of the war when I was a child. I was too young to really understand what was going on but one of my favorite pieces of animation now is that Goodbye Blue Sky in The Wall because that deals directly with that period in time.

I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.

The first time I ever saw people of any color was when D-Day left from my hometown in England, to go and free Europe from the war. And there was every color you could imagine, and I'd not seen that in England.

My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.

It was 1943. The U.S. had already entered World War II, so I decided to join the army.

You've gotta understand: in July of '44, the Allies were still contained on the peninsula in western France and the destruction of Europe had not really begun. War had not really touched the European continent at that point.

Part of what I loved - and love - about being around older people is the tangible sense of history they embody. I'm interested in military history, for instance, because both my grandfathers fought in World War II. I'm interested in writing because one of those grandfathers wrote books.

The notion that war forever separates veterans from the rest of mankind has been long embedded in our collective consciousness.

I began to speak well at a very advanced age - 15, 16, 17 years old. It was psychological: the trauma of war, my family and growing up on my own. I was more or less a street kid.

I think that parents grow up with an idea of what they want their kids to be like - and then their kids grow up to be people of themselves, of their own.

Mom's dad was in the army, stormed the beach at Normandy, fought through the French hedgerows, the Battle of the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge, and liberated concentration camps at the end of the war.

The family ties between hundreds of thousands of German families and their American relatives led many to think that America would never join a second war against Germany.

Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.

I made 'Saving Private Ryan' for my father. He's the one who filled my head with war stories when I was growing up.

Doing what we can to repair the world was instilled in me from an early age. I will never forget my siblings and me knitting squares for blankets to be sent to the troops during World War II. This was an inspiration from my mother.

However, while the Nazi barbarians and their collaborators threatened the entire world, I could not accept his philosophy and, after several earlier attempts, was finally accepted into the Canadian Infantry Corps during the last year of World War II.

'Catch-22''s first readers were largely of the generation that went through World War II. For them, it provided a startlingly fresh take, a much-needed, much-delayed laugh at the terror and madness they endured.

My kids have a competitive drive I never had growing up.

When I first saw California, it was extraordinary. Because I came from old, black, dark England, still recovering from World War II. I grew up with bomb sites everywhere.