Charles de Lint Quotes

You've got to spread out as far as you can, cut down a whole forest, irrigate a whole desert, just to make sure that you won't accidentally stumble upon a place that's still in its natural state.

I think you're all mad. But that's part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn't it?

We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It's a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it's true, but then so's everything.

Witchery is merely a word for what we are all capable of.

Dying doesn't end anything - it just changes where you are

The thing I like so much about short stories is that there isn't as much of an investment of time so I'm free to experiment more. If it doesn't work out, I've only lost a week or two of work. If I screw up a novel I've lost at least a year's worth of work. But the nice thing is that those experiments with short stories can be carried over to novels when the experiments do work.

We're so quick to cut away pieces of ourselves to suit a particular relationship, a job, a circle of friends, incessantly editing who we are until we fit in.

There are few joys to compare with the telling of a well-told tale.

Even, she thought, even without the gift of witchsight, there was more beauty to be found in the world than could ever be snared in language or music. And with the sight.

Often the magical elements in my books are standing in for elements of the real world, the small and magical-in-their-own-right sorts of things that we take for granted and no longer pay attention to, like the bonds of friendship that entwine our own lives with those of other people and places.

We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on.

Tattoos...are the stories in your heart, written on your skin.

It was all cheese and applause.

I finally figured out that I’m solitary by nature, but at the same time I know so many people; so many people think they own a piece of me. They shift and move under my skin, like a parade of memories that simply won’t go away. It doesn’t matter where I am, or how alone--I always have such a crowded head.

It's easy to believe in magic when you're young. Anything you couldn't explain was magic then. It didn't matter if it was science or a fairy tale. Electricity and elves were both infinitely mysterious and equally possible - elves probably more so.

There's never an easy route to the things that matter.

It's all those stories and how they braid together that tells us who and what and where we are

Most children are given far too much praise for their early drawings, so much so that they rarely learn the ability to refine their first crude efforts the way their early attempts at language are corrected.

I can’t imagine it now, but I must’ve been innocent at some time in my life. A baby don’t just get itself born bad, do it?

I love this world ... That is what rules my life. When I die, I want to have done all in my power to leave it in a better state than it was in when I found it. At the same time I know that this can never be. The world has grown so complex that one voice can do little to alter it any longer. That doesn't stop me from doing what I can but it makes the task hard. The successes are so small, the failures so large and many. It's like trying to stem a storm with one's bare hands.

It is important to know what a person was. But it's more important to know what they are now.

There are no happy endings... There are no endings, happy or otherwise. We all have our own stories which are just part of the one Story that binds both this world and Faerie. Sometimes we step into each others stories - perhaps just for a few minutes, perhaps for years - and then we step out of them again. But all the while, the Story just goes on.

Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?

I've always been interested in the outsider.

The moon likes secrets," Meran said. "And secret things. She lets mysteries bleed into her shadows and leaves us to ask whether they originated from otherworlds, or from our own imaginations.

Beauty isn't what you see on TV or in magazine ads or even necessarily in art galleries. It's a lot deeper and a lot simpler than that. It's realizing the goodness of things, it's leaving the world a little better than it was before you got here. It's appreciating the inspiration of the world around you and trying to inspire others.

I'm not...' Angharad began, but then she thought. Not what? Not a bad person? Perhaps. But had she never known anger? Never held unkind thoughts? The stranger's observation was valid. No one was innocent of darkness.

When all's said and done, all roads lead to the same end. So it's not so much which road you take, as how you take it.

Not everything has to mean something. Some things just are.

A name can't begin to encompass the sum of all her parts. But that's the magic of names, isn't it? That the complex, contradictory individuals we are can be called up complete and whole in another mind through the simple sorcery of a name.

As children, we come into the world with a natural desire to both speak and draw. Society makes sure that we learn language properly, right from the beginning, but art is treated as a gift of innate genius, something we either have or don't.

One expected growth, change; without it, the world was less, the well of inspiration dried up, the muses fled.

Life's an act of magic, too. Claire Hamill sings a line in one of her songs that really sums it up for me: 'If there's no magic, there's no meaning.' Without magic- or call it wonder, mystery, natural wisdom- nothing has any depth. It's all just surface. You know: what you see is what you get. I honestly believe there's more to everything than that, whether it's a Monet hanging in a gallery or some old vagrant sleeping in an alley.

The problem with children is that you have to put up with their parents.

I don't think the world is the way we like to think it is. I don't think it's one solid world, but many, thousands upon thousands of them--as many as there are people--because each person perceives the world in his or her own way; each lives in his or her own world. Sometimes they connect, for a moment, or more rarely, for a lifetime, but mostly we are alone, each living in our own world, suffering our small deaths.

She knew this music--knew it down to the very core of her being--but she had never heard it before. Unfamiliar, it had still always been there inside her, waiting to be woken. It grew from the core of mystery that gives a secret its special delight, religion its awe. It demanded to be accepted by simple faith, not dissected or questioned, and at the same time, it begged to be doubted and probed.

The old gods and their magics did not dwindle away into murky memories of brownies and little fairies more at home in a Disney cartoon; rather, they changed. The coming of Christ and Christians actually freed them. They were no longer bound to people's expectations but could now become anything that they could imagine themselves to be. They are still here, walking among us. We just don't recognize them anymore.

What I want to do is travel deep and deeper into the dreamlands, to find that place that I know is waiting for me here. My home.

Magic's never what you expect it to be, but it's often what you need.

You can't stand up to the night until you understand what's hiding in its shadows.

Lies were like having a pregnant rabbit. One day you had one, but before you knew it, there were rabbits all over the place.

The trouble with advice is that it's usually something you don't want to hear.

I'm a writer and this is what I do no matter what name we put to it. Year by year, the world is turning into a darker and stranger place than any of us could want. This is the only thing I do that has potential to shine a little further than my immediate surroundings. For me, each story is a little candle held up to the dark of night, trying to illuminate the hope for a better world where we all respect and care for each other.

Inside us lies every possibility that is available to a sentient being. Every darkness, every light. It is the choices we make that decide who or what we will be.

It's not something you can prove....I know you hate to hear this, but you either have it, or you don't.

The best artists know what to leave out.

... we chase after ghosts and spirits and are left holding only memories and dreams. It's not that we want what we can't have; it's that we've held all we could want and then had to watch it slip away.

[She] had felt straight away that she wasn’t meeting a new friend, but recognizing an old one.