Quotes of Rene Denfeld

Rene DenfeldRene Denfeld

5 min read · 12.4K reads

“The truth is, clocks don’t tell time. Time is measured in meaning.” ― Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted
“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 Enchanted
“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, The Enchanted
“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, The Enchanted
“The walls that might make others feel like they are suffocating have become my lungs.” ― Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted
“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, The Enchanted
“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, The Enchanted
“Fear never keeps anyone safe” ― Rene Denfeld, The Child Finder
“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, The Child Finder
“You can tell me anything, her eyes say, because I will see the beauty in everything you say.” ― Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted
“Your worst dungeon might be the room with the most windows.” ― Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted
“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, The Enchanted
“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, The Enchanted
“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, The Enchanted
“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, The Enchanted
“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, The Enchanted
“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 Enchanted
“The truth is, clocks don't tell time. Time is measured in meaning.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, The Enchanted
“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, The Enchanted
Rene Denfeld
About the poet

Rene Denfeld

Rene Denfeld is the bestselling author of THE CHILD FINDER, THE ENCHANTED, THE BUTTERFLY GIRL, which Margaret Atwood called "a heartbreaking, finger-gnawing, yet ultimately hopeful novel." Her next novel is SLEEPING GIANTS will be be published March 2024 by H…

View profile & all 1 Poems / Stories

More Poetry & Stories You May Like