Top 100 Charles De Lint Quotes
#1. Sometimes we wonder what it's like to feel normal," Maida said. "You know, like all the people you see out on the streets or sitting in their little boxy homes."
...
"But then", Maida went on, "we see how boring they are and we're happy to be the way we are.
Charles De Lint
#2. Everybody's got the potential for great good and great wrong in them, but it's the choices we make that define who we really are.
Charles De Lint
#3. The trouble with advice is that it's usually something you don't want to hear.
Charles De Lint
#4. Let me give you some advice: Try to approach things without preconceived ideas, without supposing you already know everything there is to know about them. Get that trick down and you'll be surprised at what's really all around you.
Charles De Lint
#5. What we take from the spirit world is only a reflection of what lies inside ourselves.
Charles De Lint
#6. T.H. moved through the forest like the melody of a well-known song, in perfect harmony with his surroundings.
Charles De Lint
#7. I don't want to live in the kind of world where we don't look out for each other. Not just the people that are close to us, but anybody who needs a helping hand. I cant change the way anybody else thinks, or what they choose to do, but I can do my bit.
Charles De Lint
#8. [She] had felt straight away that she wasn't meeting a new friend, but recognizing an old one.
Charles De Lint
#9. Witchery is merely a word for what we are all capable of.
Charles De Lint
#10. living in an environment I can't control doesn't scare me. I'm partial to the surprises.
Charles De Lint
#11. Sculptors, poets, painters, musicians-they're the traditional purveyors of Beauty. But it can as easily be created by a gardener, a farmer, a plumber, a careworker.
Charles De Lint
#12. I'd say that any character or setting can be given a bit of an otherworldly sheen and be the better for it. The one thing I insist on with my own writing is that I won't let magic solve my characters' real world problems. The solutions have to come from the characters themselves.
Charles De Lint
#13. The real problem is, people think life is a ladder, and it's really a wheel.
Charles De Lint
#14. An now the silences come in a single lifetime, in a single year ... when species die, leaving a silent space in the world song that can never be filled.
Charles De Lint
#15. I've always believed the lies we use to make our fictions reveal the truth with far more honesty than any history or herstory or life story.
Charles De Lint
#16. I don't actually talk about my books much, because I find if I talk about them I don't want to write them anymore. I write to find out what happens. You know how you read a book? That's what I'm doing except I'm just doing it a lot slower because it takes a lot longer to do.
Charles De Lint
#17. You've got to find yourself first. Everything else'll follow.
Charles De Lint
#18. If all the darkness each of us carries within us, all our angers and unhappiness and bad moments were pulled out of us and given shape, we would all create monsters.
Charles De Lint
#19. I think you're all mad. But that's part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn't it?
Charles De Lint
#21. Tattoos ... are the stories in your heart, written on your skin.
Charles De Lint
#22. All forests are one... They are all echoes of the first forest that gave birth to Mystery when the world began.
Charles De Lint
#23. 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.
Charles De Lint
#24. 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.
Charles De Lint
#25. One expected growth, change; without it, the world was less, the well of inspiration dried up, the muses fled.
Charles De Lint
#26. Magic lies in between things, between the day and the night, between yellow and blue, between any two things.
Charles De Lint
#27. She hoped he was running to his red deer woman, and that when he tapped on the door of her heart, she'd open it wide and let him in.
Charles De Lint
#28. When one of my characters becomes aware of a magical element, it might be because the world is wider than we assume it to be, but it might also be a reminder to pay attention to what is here already, hidden only because it's been forgotten.
Charles De Lint
#29. The beginning of a friendship, the fact that two people out of the thousands around them can meet and connect and become friends, seems like a kind of magic to me. But maintaining a friendship requires work. I don't mean that as a bad thing. Good art requires work as well.
Charles De Lint
#30. Why did men worship in churches, locking themselves away in the dark, when the world lay beyond its doors in all its real glory?
Charles De Lint
#31. It may sound trite, but using the weapons of the enemy, no matter how good one's intentions, makes one the enemy.
Charles De Lint
#32. They have alls these laws and social boundaries to keep the worst of them in check. The problem is, villains and bullies just ignore that kind of thing.
Charles De Lint
#33. Dying doesn't end anything - it just changes where you are
Charles De Lint
#34. I watched the people passing below, each of them a story, each story part of somebody else's, all of it connected to the big story of the world. People weren't islands, so far as I was concerned. How could they be, when their stories kept getting tangled up in everybody else's?
Charles De Lint
#35. The stronger a woman gets, the more insecure the men in her life feel. It doesn't work that way for a woman. We celebrate strength
in our partners as well as in ourselves.
Charles De Lint
#36. The road leading to a goal does not separate you from the destination; it is essentially a part of it.
Charles De Lint
#37. It is important to know what a person was. But it's more important to know what they are now.
Charles De Lint
#38. To me there's no difference between writing YA and adult except that in YA I make the book a little shorter and the protagonists are teens. The difference is in the readers.
Charles De Lint
#39. I've always known and been interested in people who are a little bit off the norm. I like to call attention to the idea that they are there, that they are real people, not invisible.
Charles De Lint
#40. " ... he had understood, better than anyone ... the beauty that grew out of the simple knowledge that everything, no matter how small or large it might be, was a perfect example of what it was."
Charles De Lint
#41. Thing is, while I know better, I like sounding ignorant. Talk like this and people figure you're about as dumb as a fencepost, which suits me fine. Makes it all that much easier to take advantage of 'em.
Charles De Lint
#42. 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.
Charles De Lint
#45. We end up stumbling our way through the forest, never seeing all the unexpected and wonderful possibilities and potentials because we're looking for the idea of a tree, instead of appreciating the actual trees in front of us.
Charles De Lint
#46. There's stories and then there's stories. The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you've heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on, and the giving only makes you feel better. The others are just words on a page.
Charles De Lint
#47. 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.
Charles De Lint
#48. Well, you know this world isn't perfect.' 'No, you're wrong. This world IS perfect, people just come along and mess it up sometimes.
Charles De Lint
#49. There is no plan, no future laid out for any of us beyond what we make for ourselves.
Charles De Lint
#50. Compromise is necessary ... so long as you never give up who you are. That isn't compromise; that's spiritual death. You have to remain true to yourself.
Charles De Lint
#51. The thing with pretending you're in a good mood is that sometimes you can.
Charles De Lint
#52. You wouldn't want any creative process to lose its sense of fun and adventure, but that doesn't mean you can't take it seriously as well.
Charles De Lint
#54. Not everything has to mean something. Some things just are.
Charles De Lint
#55. One cannot seek to uphold honor in a being that has none.
Charles De Lint
#56. There's bad apples in whatever way you want to group people - doesn't matter if it's religious, political or social. The big mistake is generalizing.
Charles De Lint
#57. 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.
Charles De Lint
#58. I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile.
Charles De Lint
#59. Everybody's got a true home - maybe not where they're living, but
where their heart lives.
Charles De Lint
#60. Stone walls confine a tinker; cold iron binds a witch; but a musician's music can never be fettered, for it lives first in her heart and mind.
Charles De Lint
#61. Fortune-telling doesn't reveal the future; it mirrors the present. It resonates against what your subconscious already knows and hauls it up out of the darkness so you can get a good look at it.
Charles De Lint
#62. Ghosts were just a way that some stupid people dealt with their dull lives.
Charles De Lint
#63. Like legend and myth, magic fades when it is unused
hence all the old tales of elfin kingdoms moving further and further away from our world, or that magical beings require our faith, our belief in their existence, to survive. That is a lie. All they require is our recognition.
Charles De Lint
#64. It's the questions we ask, the journey we take to get to where we are going that is more important than the actual answer.
Charles De Lint
#65. Only fools think they're wise; the rest of us just muddle through as we can.
Charles De Lint
#66. The faerie represent the beauty we don't see, or even choose to ignore. That's why I'll paint them in junkyards, or fluttering around a sleeping wino. No place or person is immune to spirit. Look hard enough, and everything has a story. Everybody is important.- Jilly Coppercorn
Charles De Lint
#67. There's nothing wrong with a youthful prospective. Don't forget- no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories you have to tell.
Charles De Lint
#69. How hard would it be to ask children what they see in their heads? How big should the house be in comparison to the family standing in front of it? What is it about the anatomy of the people that doesn't look right? Then let them try it again. Teach them to learn how to see and ask questions.
Charles De Lint
#70. 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.
Charles De Lint
#71. 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.
Charles De Lint
#72. 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.
Charles De Lint
#73. The more she tried to recapture the impulse that had set her wanting to put pen to paper, the less it seemed to have ever existed in the first place.
Charles De Lint
#74. Don't forget - no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.
Charles De Lint
#75. There are people who take the heart out of you, and there are people who put it back.
Charles De Lint
#76. Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?
Charles De Lint
#77. 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 ...
Charles De Lint
#78. Don't start brooding about that, too," she says. "Everybody's got a piece of stranger inside them. It's what lets us surprise ourselves and keeps things interesting." -Lupita
Charles De Lint
#79. What if time's not linear, the way people think it is? What if the past, present and future are all going on at the same time, only they're separated by- oh, I don't know- a kind of gauze or something. And maybe there are people that can see through that gauze.
Charles De Lint
#80. Every book tells a different story to the person who reads it. How they perceive that book will depend on who they are. A good book reflects the reader, as much as it illuminates the author's text.
Charles De Lint
#81. Life is like art. You have to work hard to keep it simple and still have meaning.
Charles De Lint
#82. I hate the thought of her being forced into a box that doesn't fit her. Of having her wings cut off, her sight blinded, her hearing muted, her voice stilled.
Charles De Lint
#83. There's more to life than just surviving ... but ... sometimes just surviving is all you get
Charles De Lint
#84. I like living in the city where I have all my books and music and can go out to buy that night's dinner or easily see a band. But I also like the wild places, especially hiking in the desert and the Eastern woodlands. Do I have to choose?
Charles De Lint
#85. The few wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them.
Charles De Lint
#86. If you don't believe that the world has a heart, then you won't hear it beating, you won't think it's alive and you won't consider what you're doing to it.
Charles De Lint
#87. 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?
Charles De Lint
#88. You know how we'd get along better? If everybody'd just remember how we're all related. White, black, Asian, skin. No difference. All the bloodlines go back to that one old mama in Africa.
Charles De Lint
#89. Books and music saved me as a teenager because it was through them that I realized that I wasn't alone in my obsessive love for words and music.
Charles De Lint
#90. You don't have to be Michelangelo to teach basic art, just as you don't have to be Shakespeare to be able to teach the correct use of language.
Charles De Lint
#91. Let it go on record that any confusion arose simply because we lacked certain commonalities of reference.
Charles De Lint
#92. I find the characters in my head and the more I write about them, the better I get to know them.
Charles De Lint
#93. It's not the work or the personality of the founder of a religion that's important, but what its followers do with what they learn.
Charles De Lint
#94. Children are the brightest treasures we bring forth into this world, but too large a percentage of the population continues to treat them as inconveniences and nuisances, when they're not treating them as possessions or toys.
Charles De Lint
#95. 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.
Charles De Lint
#96. Everything is the way it is because we've all agreed that's the way it is.
Charles De Lint
#97. That's the thing about magic; you've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you.
Charles De Lint
#98. Magic's never what you expect it to be, but it's often what you need.
Charles De Lint
#99. You must always confront your fears," Goon said as though she hadn't spoken. "Then skulking monsters become merely unfamiliar shadows, thrown by a tree bough. Whispering voices are just the wind. The wild flare of panic is merely a burst of emotion, not a terror spell cast by some evil witch.
Charles De Lint
#100. ...What makes it magic is taht we choose to create or help, just as we can choose to harm. But it's so easy to destroy and so much harder to make things better. that's why doing the right thing makes you stronger.
Charles De Lint
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