66 Quotes by Rene Denfeld

Be careful the purpose doesn't destroy you.

His mild efforts at curiosity had been rebuffed--not with coldness but with her single-minded focus on her cases. And yet he could sense something deeply vulnerable about her. It was that part of her that spoke to his soul. He wasn't a ledge talker for nothing.

there is no game in her smile. There is warmth and kindness and something that looks like steel. You can tell me anything, her eyes say, because I will see the beauty in everything you say.

Time is measured in meaning

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.