Top 100 Charles De Lint Quotes
#1. The fey wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them. CHARLES DE LINT
Graham Joyce
#2. It's all those stories and how they braid together that tells us who and what and where we are
Charles De Lint
#3. 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
#4. Writing music uses a whole different process that involves a lot of noodling and just seeing what comes.
Charles De Lint
#5. 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
#6. By enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged.
Charles De Lint
#7. There are few joys to compare with the telling of a well-told tale.
Charles De Lint
#8. It is important to know what a person was. But it's more important to know what they are now.
Charles De Lint
#9. When you're invisible, no one can see that you're different.
Charles De Lint
#10. The road leading to a goal does not separate you from the destination; it is essentially a part of it.
Charles De Lint
#11. Yes, no. I don't know. It's all so confusing. I'm just a kid."
Abuelo smiled. "You kept saying that while you told me your story, but what does it mean?"
"That I'm too young to have to be making decisions like this."
"You're never too young to do the right thing," Abuelo said.
Charles De Lint
#12. 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
#13. Gina always believed there was magic in the world. "But it doesn't work in the way it does in fairy tales," she told me. "It doesn't save us. We have to save ourselves.
Charles De Lint
#14. 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
#15. The minutes dragged by as they only did when you had no choice but to wait for something.
Charles De Lint
#16. Dying doesn't end anything - it just changes where you are
Charles De Lint
#17. Look inside yourself for the answers - you're the only one who knows what's best for you. Everybody else is only guessing.
Charles De Lint
#18. Well, while I didn't have the more extreme experiences of some of my characters, I didn't exactly come from the most normal of households. Or rather, it was normal, in that dysfunctional families appear to be the norm.
Charles De Lint
#19. It's all a matter of paying attention, being awake in the present moment, and not expecting a huge payoff. The magic in this world seems to work in whispers and small kindnesses.
Charles De Lint
#20. Wondering's healthy. Broadens the mind. Opens you up to all sorts of stray thoughts and possibilities.
Charles De Lint
#21. 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
#22. I want to be magic. I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile. I want to be a friend of elves and live in a tree. Or under a hill. I want to marry a moonbeam and hear the stars sing. I don't want to pretend at magic anymore. I want to be magic.
Charles De Lint
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. It's good to have mysteries. It reminds us that there's more to the world than just making do and having a bit of fun.
Charles De Lint
#27. 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
#29. 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
#30. Most times we only see things for the way we are. But we're good at lying to ourselves. Sometimes we need somebody who's not living in our skin to point out how things really are.
Charles De Lint
#31. The thing with pretending you're in a good mood is that sometimes you can.
Charles De Lint
#32. 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
#33. She wanted to tell him what happened wasn't really his fault, but she knew that wasn't the way this kind of guilt worked. Intellectually, he already knew that. It was his emotions that were tripping him up. The tangle of love and memory and what might have been.
Charles De Lint
#34. There is no plan, no future laid out for any of us beyond what we make for ourselves.
Charles De Lint
#35. Faerie music is the wind", he says, "and their movement is the play of shadow cast by moonlight, or starlight, or no light at all. Faerie lives like a ghost beside us, but only the city remembers. But then the city never forgets anything.
Charles De Lint
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. The puppet thinks: It's not so much what they make me do as their hands inside me.
Charles De Lint
#40. I don't know what's waiting for us when we die
something better, something worse. I only know I'm not ready to find out yet.
Charles De Lint
#41. It reminded me of that tongue-in-cheek quick history of art I'd overheard ... Used to be people couldn't draw very well, then they could, and now they can't again.
Charles De Lint
#42. I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets.
Charles De Lint
#45. A long time ago a bunch of people reached a general consensus as to what's real and what's not and most of us have been going along with it ever since.
Charles De Lint
#46. 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
#47. Everything, everybody wanted to lay claim to a piece of your soul. And if they couldn't have it, they made you pay for it in guilt.
Charles De Lint
#48. There are as many stories to be told as there are people to tell them about; only the mean-spirited would consider there to be a competition at all.
Charles De Lint
#49. 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
#50. The real trouble comes from not knowing what we really want in the first place.
Charles De Lint
#51. " ... 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
#52. It's not all about getting your own way. Sometimes there's a bigger picture.
Charles De Lint
#53. 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
#54. My characters seem real because they are drawn from the realities of my life. I didn't have to research their pain; I just tapped into my own.
Charles De Lint
#55. The real problem is, people think life is a ladder, and it's really a wheel.
Charles De Lint
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. living in an environment I can't control doesn't scare me. I'm partial to the surprises.
Charles De Lint
#59. Witchery is merely a word for what we are all capable of.
Charles De Lint
#60. Wisdom never comes to those who believe they have nothing left to learn.
Charles De Lint
#62. [She] had felt straight away that she wasn't meeting a new friend, but recognizing an old one.
Charles De Lint
#63. 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
#64. T.H. moved through the forest like the melody of a well-known song, in perfect harmony with his surroundings.
Charles De Lint
#65. Remember the quiet wonders. The world has more need of them than it has for warriors.
Charles De Lint
#66. We call them faerie. We don't believe in them. Our loss.
Charles De Lint
#67. What we take from the spirit world is only a reflection of what lies inside ourselves.
Charles De Lint
#68. I'm really bad at describing my books. Journalists like to have things like "It's The Terminator Meets the Seven Dwarfs." And I can't do that with my books. If I could, I probably wouldn't write them.
Charles De Lint
#69. We are wise women," Abuela liked to say. "Not because we are wise, but because we seek wisdom.
Charles De Lint
#70. 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
#71. The trouble with advice is that it's usually something you don't want to hear.
Charles De Lint
#72. As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.
Charles De Lint
#73. It's not something you can prove ... I know you hate to hear this, but you either have it, or you don't.
Charles De Lint
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. But that's what we all are-just stories. We only exist by how people remember us, by the stories we make of our lives. Without the stories, we'd just fade away.
Charles De Lint
#77. All forests are one... They are all echoes of the first forest that gave birth to Mystery when the world began.
Charles De Lint
#78. There was too much going on here
too much that strayed from odd all the way over into seriously weird.
Charles De Lint
#79. 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
#80. 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.
Charles De Lint
#81. 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.
Charles De Lint
#82. Magic lies in between things, between the day and the night, between yellow and blue, between any two things.
Charles De Lint
#83. One expected growth, change; without it, the world was less, the well of inspiration dried up, the muses fled.
Charles De Lint
#84. She shrugged. Everybody makes the same mistake. 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 that you can get a good look at it.
Charles De Lint
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. You hear this kind of thing, rednecks and their guys and--"
"Don't call them that," I say. "They're just assholes. Most people you run into around here...well, maybe they won't like the length of your hair, but they'll keep their feelings to themselves.
Charles De Lint
#88. There's no such thing as fiction", Annie told him once. "If you can imagine something, then it's happened.
Charles De Lint
#89. 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
#90. Tattoos ... are the stories in your heart, written on your skin.
Charles De Lint
#92. I think you're all mad. But that's part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn't it?
Charles De Lint
#93. 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
#94. You've got to find yourself first. Everything else'll follow.
Charles De Lint
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. I can't think of a better rationale to create a work of art. I don't care what form one's art takes, it has to be an attempt to leave the world a better place than it was before we got here or it's not doing its job. And I don't mean just making things that are pretty.
Charles De Lint
#98. It is so easy for your people to forget that everything has a spirit, that all are equal. That magic and mystery are a part of your lives, not something to store away in a child's bedroom, or to use as an escape from your lives.
Charles De Lint
#99. He's this Goth dude, can control people." "Goth, like a Visigoth German Viking of the middle ages, or a Neil Gaiman-looking, Robert Smith, make-up-and-moonbeams Cure fan?" "What's a Neil Gaiman?" "You're an idiot.
Charles De Lint
#100. There's never an easy route to the things that matter.
Charles De Lint
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