Rene Denfeld Quotes

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

Rene Denfeld

#2. [ ... ] 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

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

Rene Denfeld

#4. 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

#5. People try to make names for things they don't understand

Rene Denfeld

#6. 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

#7. 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

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

Rene Denfeld

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

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

Rene Denfeld

#13. 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

#14. 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

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

Rene Denfeld

#16. Everything was sacred when nothing was taken for granted, she thinks ruefully.

Rene Denfeld

#17. 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

#18. The truth is, clocks don't tell time. Time is measured in meaning.

Rene Denfeld

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

Rene Denfeld

#20. The walls that might make others feel like they are suffocating have become my lungs.

Rene Denfeld

#21. Time is measured in meaning

Rene Denfeld

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. I sit on my narrow bunk and caress my long yellow toenails and stare at my walls.

Rene Denfeld

#25. 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

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

Rene Denfeld

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

Rene Denfeld

#28. 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

#29. Your worst dungeon might be the room with the most windows.

Rene Denfeld

#30. 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

#31. This is a place of true imagination.

Rene Denfeld

#32. 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