The Enchanted Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“I retreat from my bars, wondering why people who live outside choose such ugly words. Maybe that is what happens when you are outside, and the world clangs and barrels and shouts twenty-four hours a day, from your radio your television your wife your neighbor the lawn mower down the street and the scream of airplanes from the sky. Maybe then you use ugly words to tell life to shut up.”
― Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

“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, The Enchanted

“What is it in our world that breeds such howling despair?”
― Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

“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, The Enchanted

“People try to make names for things they don't understand”
― Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

“I read everything in that dusty little library. I read the prologues and the epilogues until I could tell you how many times Stephen King thanked his wife, Tabitha. I could tell you how the Columbia Indians made their long-houses, or how to make a solar toilet, or how to dry bear meat in the sun. I could tell you all of this if I could talk, but instead the words stayed inside of me and marveled. This I could accept, or so I told myself for a long time. Because the words were there, and they carried me to another place.”
― Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

“Everything was sacred when nothing was taken for granted, she thinks ruefully.”
― Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

“I imagine he knows magic, if he is reading books.”
― Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

“If death row is a sharp punishment, life without parole can be an endless torture.”
― Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

“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.”
― Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

“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, The Enchanted

“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, The Enchanted

“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, The Enchanted