“Until there was Piper McCloud.The probability of a flier is so rare, so completely out of the ordinary, and it was the very thing that Conrad needed to make an escape plan work. The minute he saw that Piper could fly, he knew hope. He carefully plotted and prepared for every eventuality except one---Piper's refusal to leave without the other's.How can she be so colosally stupid??!! Didn't she understand?”

“I'm as light as a cloud, as free as a bird. I'm part of the sky and I can fly.”

“Dang! Look at that RAINBOW!" Piper shouted, accidently spewing bits of apple pie from her overstuffed mouth. All quickly turned and saw......exactly what Piper claimed, a rainbow.”

“She says it’s wrong to be frittering away my hours asking questions when there’s work to be done. But I don’t see how a question can be wrong. Can you, Pa? Ma says the Bible sets out what’s right and wrong so we don’t have to bother ourselves with it none but it seems to me that it ain’t so matter-of-fact. Like when you kilt that old cow last week and I didn’t want to eat it ’cause he was my favorite and so gentle besides. Ma said I was sinful to waste food. But I said that maybe we shouldn’t go about killing and eating cows when they was so peaceful-like. Ma said that was foolishness and that God put the cows here just so as we can eat ’em. But that don’t seem like such a good deal for the cows to me. Preacher told us not more than four Sundays ago that God loves all his creatures, but it ain’t loving to my way of thinking to create a thing just for it to be food. Them cows ain’t never done nothing to us. Which got me to thinking that maybe we got it wrong and they got a purpose we don’t know nothing about.”

“At that moment, he was meaner and madder than he’d ever been, but mainly at himself, which is the worst kind of mean and mad to be, because the only thing to do about it is to take it out on someone else.”

“My ma told me that there isn't anything in this life worth having that comes easy. She told me that every road I walk down's gonna have a price. But what she didn't tell me and what I learned since I've been here is that if you don't choose the road you're gonna walk, sooner or later someone else'll do that choosing for you.”

“Like the birds I will fly.”