Rene Denfeld Quotes

But he saw Naomi as the wind traveling over the field, always searching, never stopping, and never knowing that true piece is when you curl around one little piece of something. One little fern. One little frond. One person to love.

She is afraid, and yet she wants the priest to see inside her and accept the monsters that wrap around the secret, pure part of her--the part she managed to save, miraculously, that so many of us have lost. she knows the monsters are there and yet wants to be seen.

He knows that when she passes, a grief will rip through him unlike anything he has ever known. Preparing for it doesn't help. He just knows it will come. It is like realizing you are sailing a boat across an ocean and soon you will find the other shore- it will be just you and acres of dry, blinding white sand. There may be trees on that island, and sun, and food, but none of it will feel or taste right, because you will stand there and realize: I am alone.

If there are ever times when I would regret the choice York is making, it is times like these, when life feels like another page waiting to get turned.

How odd it is, that the dead weigh more than the living. You would think it would be the opposite, but it isn't. I think it is because souls give bodies lightness and air. When the soul leaves, the body has nothing left and is desperate to return to the earth. That's why it's so heavy.

Later I read that there are things inside us too tiny to see. Not even a microscope can capture them. This got me thinking
if there are things inside us too tiny to see, might there be things outside us too big to believe?

What if we are all capable of lying to ourselves? But the story didn't bother Naomi. Instead it reassured her confirming that the stories we tell ourselves have more meaning than the facts. That doesn't make them lies. Seeded with every myth was the emotional truth.

This is a place of true imagination.

No one ever told you what to do when love went away. It was always about capturing love, and keeping love. Not about watching it walk out the door to die alone rather than in your arms.

Men who have not been violated don't understand what it is like to have the edges of your body blurred - to feel that every inch of your skin is a place where fingers can press, that every hole and orifice is a place where others can put parts of their bodies. When your body stops being corporeal, your soul has no place to go, so it finds the next window to escape.
My soul left me when I was six. It flew away past a flapping curtain over a window. I ran after it, but it never came back. It left me alone on wet stinking mattresses. It left me alone in the choking dark. It took my tongue, my heart, and my mind.
When you don't have a soul, the ideas inside you become terrible things. They grow unchecked, like malignant monsters. You cry in the night because you know the ideas are wrong - you know because people have told you that - and yet none of it does any good. The ideas are free to grow. There is no soul inside you to stop them.

Anyway, time is more than counting days. On the outside, people think clocks tell them the time. They set an alarm for work and wake up to a blinking light that says six a.m. They look to an office wall to tell them if it is time to go home. The truth is, clocks don't tell time. Time is measured in meaning. I better get up for work or It's time to feed the baby. Or That was the year I got cancer or That is the day we celebrate your birthday. Or Remember when our father died or Let's remember to plant turnips this spring. It is meaning that drives most people forward into time, and it is meaning that reminds them of the past, so they know where they are in the universe.

Shame was a peculiar beast, Naomi knew. She suspected everyone had it: the dragon they wanted to slay. But for her it was different. Naomi wanted to bathe in it, to stand under its waterfall and come out blessed.

America was an iceberg shattered into a billion fragments, and on each stood a person, rotating like an ice floe in a storm.

They can keep men in here, under lock and key, deep in the dungeon until the final moments of their lives, so that men like York and me will never taste the rain. But they cannot keep us from passing our condensation on to the sky. They cannot keep us from raining down in China.

Now when those dark times happen, I curl into a ball on my cot and make a cape with my blanket. I remind myself I am not dust, but I should be. I tell myself I am made of the same cells as life itself even if I am a mistake.

She thinks how sad it is that we remember the killers and not their victims. What if the world forgot Hitler and remembered all the names of his victims? What is we immortalized the victims?

I'm afraid," she confessed, her voice quiet.
"Of what?"
"That if the box is opened I might want and want and never be filled." She took a breath. "That you will get tired of filling it." She paused and spoke her deepest fear, turning to his ear. "That you will use me and throw me away.

She winds her way through gorgeous blue conifer forests, past glistening rivers and curves that give glimpses of heaven.

There comes a time when all the secrets are told and all that is left are their spent ghosts.

It will be people like us that save the world, she said: those who have walked the side of sorrow and seen the dawn.

(She) didn't believe in resilience. She believed in imagination.

What is it in our world that breeds such howling despair?

Even monsters need peace. Even monsters need a person who truly wants to listen
to hear
so that someday we might find the words that are more than boxes. Then maybe we can stop men like me from happening.

After a time, it seemed that the world inside the books became my world. So when I thought of my childhood, it was dandelion wine and ice cream on a summer porch, like Ray Bradbury, and catching catfish with Huck Finn. My own memories receded and the book memories became the real memories, far more than the outside, far more even than in here.

Inside, the lies you tell become the person you become. On the outside, sun and reality shrink people back to their actual size. In here, people grow into their shadows.

If death row is a sharp punishment, life without parole can be an endless torture.

Snow girl was glad she had left her own feelings behind.

The books brought brilliance to my life, and they brought an understanding: Life is a story. Everything that has happened and will happen to me is all part of the story of this enchanted place - all the dreams and visions and understandings that come to me in my dungeon cell. The books helped me see the truth is not in the touch of the stone but in what the stone tells you.

You can tell me anything, her eyes say, because I will see the beauty in everything you say.

The warden always seems to know which book to bring. When the sun is gunslinger blue, the warden brings a western. When rain slates against the towers and the world has gone hopeless with gray, it is Bible stories. When the halls ring with the cries of riot and the bars of my own cell rattle with pain, the warden drops a soft book on the floor, solace in its pages: the collected poems of Walt Whitman. And oh, my favorites, like the tastes of childhood. Every few months the warden passes me The White Dawn, and for a few precious days I traverse the open heavens on hard-packed moonlit snow and see the blue splashing arctic lights, and I fill my belly with frozen seal meat and laugh with my Inuit friends.

And for the next long years of my life, I tried to remember only the reading, not the terrible things that happened to me as I came and went up and down the stairs. The library became my sanctuary. I loved the ways the precious stories took shape but always had room to be read again. I became fascinated with how writers did that. How did they make a story feel so complete and yet to open-ended? It was like painting a picture that changed each time you looked at it.

If you understand what makes him tick-what is magic for him- then you can understand anyone

You can tell me everything, her eyes say, because I will see beauty in everything you say.

I imagine he knows magic, if he is reading books. The book itself doesn't matter. It's that he found another world in it.

Fear never keeps anyone safe