Quotes from Cynthia Rylant

Drop some of them bricks you keep hauling around with you. Life just ain't that heavy.

It is almost impossible for a parent to hold a secret from a child. Children, without the skills of language, spend years developing instead an intuition. By the time they are fifteen, as I was, they are masters of a kind of clairvoyance that tells them, He is depressed, He is frightened, He is pleased.

Sometimes a person really must choose between two good things. Two good things, thought Flora. I would choose the thing that involved a cat.

A remarkable fact of nature is that problems almost always get solved just when they are meant to. And those who can help solve the problems almost always show up at the right time.

A castle. Far off, in the hills in the distance. It was as if I were looking at a postcard from my childhood, the feeling was so familiar, and I thought for a moment that the castle had been built by me. I line up all the little knights that lay in the box in the basement: castle. And sheep. Sheep grazing in a nearby meadow. . . . The mortar shells began to land in that meadow, and the sheep were hit, and lay bloody, half-alive, their bowels spilling among the meadow flowers.

Joe sat on the couch, his long legs sprawled in front of him, and listened to the latest report of soldiers dead. The walls blinked and his face, too, went black, white, black, white, as the pictures crossed the television screen.

It is when we are most lost that we sometimes find our truest friends.