Rene Denfeld Quotes & Sayings

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. — Rene Denfeld

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

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

People try to make names for things they don't understand — Rene Denfeld

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

I retreat from my bars, wondering why people who live outside choose such ugly words. Maybe that is what happens when you are outside, and the world clangs and barrels and shouts twenty-four hours a day, from your radio your television your wife your neighbor the lawn mower down the street and the scream of airplanes from the sky. Maybe then you use ugly words to tell life to shut up. — Rene Denfeld

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

I hear them, the fallen priest and the lady. Their footsteps sound like the soft hush of rain over the stone floors. — Rene Denfeld

The truth is, clocks don't tell time. Time is measured in meaning. — Rene Denfeld

The look in her eyes is of a person who drank from the end of a gun barrel and found it delicious. — Rene Denfeld

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

I would think for hours how strange it was that some parts of words are silent, just like some parts of our lives. Did the people who wrote the dictionaries decide to mirror language to our lives, or did it just happen that way? — Rene Denfeld

The walls that might make others feel like they are suffocating have become my lungs. — Rene Denfeld

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. — Rene Denfeld

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

The lady hasn't lost it yet - the sound of freedom. When she laughs, you can hear the wind in the trees and the splash of water hitting pavement. You can sense the gentle caress of rain on your face and how laughter sounds in the open air, all the things those of us in this dungeon can never feel. — Rene Denfeld

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. — Rene Denfeld

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? — Rene Denfeld

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

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

Your worst dungeon might be the room with the most windows. — Rene Denfeld

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

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. — Rene Denfeld

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

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

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. — Rene Denfeld

Time is measured in meaning — Rene Denfeld

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

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. — Rene Denfeld

I read everything in that dusty little library. I read the prologues and the epilogues until I could tell you how many times Stephen King thanked his wife, Tabitha. I could tell you how the Columbia Indians made their long-houses, or how to make a solar toilet, or how to dry bear meat in the sun. I could tell you all of this if I could talk, but instead the words stayed inside of me and marveled. This I could accept, or so I told myself for a long time. Because the words were there, and they carried me to another place. — Rene Denfeld

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

Her courage frightens and amazes me. It make me hopeful for her. Is that what you call love? Is that what you call hope? — Rene Denfeld

I sit on my narrow bunk and caress my long yellow toenails and stare at my walls. — Rene Denfeld

Everything was sacred when nothing was taken for granted, she thinks ruefully. — Rene Denfeld

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. — Rene Denfeld

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. — Rene Denfeld

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

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

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

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

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

This is a place of true imagination. — Rene Denfeld

[ ... ] and every time she says the word, it breaks her heart into pieces that she has to pick up in her hands and shove back in her chest. — Rene Denfeld