Quotes from Rene Denfeld

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.

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

I imagine he knows magic, if he is reading books.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This is something I know: no matter how far you have run, no matter how long you have been lost, it is never too late to be found.

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.

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.