I Had Seen Castles Quotes

“The war was just a mile or so away, and I wondered at my simply walking to it, as I might walk to the market or to school. Today I will walk to the war.”
― Cynthia Rylant, I Had Seen Castles: A Coming-of-Age WWII Novel of Teen Love, Enlistment, and the Conflict Between Duty and Conscience

“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.”
― Cynthia Rylant, I Had Seen Castles: A Coming-of-Age WWII Novel of Teen Love, Enlistment, and the Conflict Between Duty and Conscience

“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.”
― Cynthia Rylant, I Had Seen Castles: A Coming-of-Age WWII Novel of Teen Love, Enlistment, and the Conflict Between Duty and Conscience