Top 40 Rene Denfeld Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Rene Denfeld

2. “The truth is not in the touch of a stone, but in what the stone tells you.”

— Rene Denfeld

3. “Hope springs eternal. Just remember: so does evil. Sometimes they are impossible to tell apart.”

— Rene Denfeld

4. “No matter how far you have run, no matter how long you have been lost, it is never too late to be found.”

— Rene Denfeld

5. “Regrets?” Diane asked cheerfully. She made a gusty little sandwich out of crackers and cheese.”

— Rene Denfeld

6. “This got me thinking – if there are things inside us too tiny to see, might there be things outside us too big to believe?”

— Rene Denfeld

7. “She stopped by an empty field, the soil abandoned, gone to mustard weed and grass. Lush bundles of crimson clover lined the fence. At the far end was a cluster of trees. As always, her eyes sought movement at the edge of the woods.”

— Rene Denfeld

8. “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.”

— Rene Denfeld

9. “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.”

— Rene Denfeld

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

— Rene Denfeld

11. “Everyone needs faith: faith that even though the world is full of evil, a suitor will come and kiss us awake; faith that the girl will escape the tower, the big bad wolf will die, and even those poisoned by malevolence can be reborn, as innocent as purity itself.”

— Rene Denfeld

12. “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.”

— Rene Denfeld

13. “Your worst dungeon might be the room with the most windows.”

— Rene Denfeld

14. “The truth is, clocks don’t tell time. Time is measured in meaning.”

— Rene Denfeld

15. “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?”

— Rene Denfeld

16. “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.”

— Rene Denfeld

17. “Are the stories we tell ourselves true or based on what we dream them to be?”

— Rene Denfeld

18. “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.”

— Rene Denfeld

19. “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.”

— Rene Denfeld

20. “The window is the reason the death row inmates go to the visiting room to see their lawyers and investigators. The lawyers think their clients want to see them. No, they want to see the window.”

— Rene Denfeld

21. “Time is measured in meaning.”

— Rene Denfeld

22. “In the years since, she had discovered the sacrament of life did not demand memory. Like a leaf that drank from the morning dew, you didn’t question the morning sunrise or the sweet taste on your mouth. You just drank.”

— Rene Denfeld

23. “She said we are all part of a secret club. Someday, she said, we will take over the earth. It will be people like us that save the world, she said: those who have walked the side of sorrow and seen the dawn.”

— Rene Denfeld

24. “People had a drive to immortalize their past, even the evil stuff, like Abu Ghraib or the Holocaust. They liked to take pictures, keep journals, because they believed in what they were doing. No one, Naomi had learned, did evil without believing it was right at the time. Maybe this was why it was nearly impossible to talk them out of it?”

— Rene Denfeld

25. “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.”

— Rene Denfeld

26. “People try to make names for things they don’t understand.”

— Rene Denfeld

27. “Everyone was harmless until you knew better.”

— Rene Denfeld

28. “Everything was sacred when nothing was taken for granted, she thinks ruefully.”

— Rene Denfeld

29. “The look in her eyes is of a person who drank from the end of a gun barrel and found it delicious.”

— Rene Denfeld

30. “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.”

— Rene Denfeld

31. “Fear never keeps anyone safe.”

— Rene Denfeld

32. “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.”

— Rene Denfeld

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

— Rene Denfeld

34. “The guards hate the priest. To them, men like the priest paper the sky with romantic tissue-paper legends, but down here below the earth, in this enchanted place, we know life cannot be contained on a slogan or a prayer tablet. We know that kindness rules with the fist and chains rule with a turn to the sky, that all humans require penance and without it we all seek punishment, over and over again, until the body and mind are satisfied and we die.”

— Rene Denfeld

35. “Sweet as sugar. And then he hardened. I can’t ’splain it another way. He was like sugar in a jar that hardens. And after a while you take it out, and it is one rock-solid lump.”

— Rene Denfeld

36. “She knelt over the grave, until her nose was touching the dirt. “When you are ready to inhabit a new skin,” she said, “we will be waiting for you.”

— Rene Denfeld

37. “Ideas are powerful things; we should take more care with them. I know there are some who would disagree – those who think ideas are like food they can taste and spit out if they don’t like it. But ideas are stronger than that. You can get a taste of an idea inside you, and the next thing you know, it won’t leave. Until you do something about it.”

— Rene Denfeld

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

— Rene Denfeld

39. “The moon, B had noticed, awakened the dawn, and so the two – like pale cousins – never saw each other. Even on the most hopeful of days the moon could only peep, from a distant sky, at the sun.”

— Rene Denfeld

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

— Rene Denfeld

41. “After the economy collapsed following the mill closure, the townspeople apparently tried to find other ways to make money. The two-block main street has boarded-up signs for the Bead Store Emporium and Nature’s Gifts. She has come to recognize bead stores as indicators of economic doom.”

— Rene Denfeld

42. “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.”

— Rene Denfeld

43. “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.”

— Rene Denfeld

44. “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.”

— Rene Denfeld

45. “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.”

— Rene Denfeld

46. “Be careful the purpose doesn’t destroy you.”

— Rene Denfeld

47. “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.”

— Rene Denfeld

48. “Stop thinking that you have to know everything to understand it.”

— Rene Denfeld

49. “Outside a pale dawn threaded the sky with silver.”

— Rene Denfeld