Quotes from 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.

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?

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

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.

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

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 then 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.

Time is measured in meaning

Outside a pale dawn threaded the sky with silver.

I'm afraid," she confessed, her voice quiet. "Of what?" "That if the box is opened I might want and want and never be filled." She took a breath. "That you will get tired of filling it." She paused and spoke her deepest fear, turning to his ear. "That you will use me and throw me away.

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.

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

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

Be careful the purpose doesn't destroy you.

Everyone was harmless until you knew better.

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

Stop thinking that you have to know everything to understand it.

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

This got me thinking - if there are things inside us too tiny to see, might there be things outside us too big to believe?

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

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.

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.

He was sweet as a baby, you know? 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.

But he saw Naomi as the wind traveling over the field, always searching, never stopping, and never knowing that true peace is when you curl around one little piece of something. One little fern. One little frond. One person to love.

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