Charles de Lint quotes
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You've got to find yourself first. Everything else'll follow.
-- Charles de Lint -
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 -
I do believe in an everyday sort of magic -- the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we're alone.
-- Charles de Lint -
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 -
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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 -
We call them faerie. We don't believe in them. Our loss.
-- Charles de Lint -
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 -
Remember the quiet wonders. The world has more need of them than it has for warriors.
-- Charles de Lint -
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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 -
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.
-- Charles de Lint -
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 -
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 -
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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 -
Can you remember how you felt when you were communicating through your artwork? Not just the sense of completion, but the sense of rightness- the sense that you had brought to life something that could live beyond your sphere of being, that held in it far more potential than you ever realized you were imbuing in the work?
-- Charles de Lint -
Everything has a spirit and it's all connected. If you think about that, if you live your life by it, then you're less likely to cause any hurt. It's like how our bodies go back into the ground when we die, so that connects us to the earth. If you dump trash, you're dumping it on your and my ancestors. Or to bring it down to its simplest level: treat everything and everybody the way you want to be treated, because when you hurt someone, you're only hurting yourself.
-- Charles de Lint -
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.
-- Charles de Lint -
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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 -
Wondering’s healthy. Broadens the mind. Opens you up to all sorts of stray thoughts and possibilities.
-- Charles de Lint -
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 -
The best artists know what to leave out.
-- Charles de Lint -
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The magic in this world seems to work in whispers and small kindnesses.
-- Charles de Lint -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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There are few joys to compare with the telling of a well-told tale.
-- Charles de Lint -
Magic's never what you expect it to be, but it's often what you need.
-- Charles de Lint -
You can't stand up to the night until you understand what's hiding in its shadows.
-- Charles de Lint -
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 -
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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 -
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 -
There's never an easy route to the things that matter.
-- Charles de Lint -
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.
-- Charles de Lint -
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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 -
Magic lies in between things, between the day and the night, between yellow and blue, between any two things.
-- Charles de Lint -
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.
-- Charles de Lint -
... 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 -
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Life is like art. You have to work hard to keep it simple and still have meaning.
-- Charles de Lint -
The problem with children is that you have to put up with their parents.
-- Charles de Lint -
Every time you do a good deed you shine the light a little farther into the dark. And the thing is, when you're gone that light is going to keep shining on, pushing the shadows back.
-- Charles de Lint -
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 -
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Witchery is merely a word for what we are all capable of.
-- Charles de Lint -
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 -
I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile.
-- Charles de Lint -
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 -
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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 -
The road leading to a goal does not separate you from the destination; it is essentially a part of it.
-- Charles de Lint -
Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?
-- Charles de Lint -
The real problem is, people think life is a ladder, and it's really a wheel.
-- Charles de Lint -
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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 -
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 -
Wisdom never comes to those who believe they have nothing left to learn.
-- Charles de Lint -
The excitement I get from writing is finding out each day what happens next.
-- Charles de Lint -
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There were two forests for every one you entered. There was the one you walked in, the physical echo, and then there was the one that was connected to all the other forests, with no consideration of distance, or time. The forest primeval, remembered through the collective memory of every tree in the same way that people remembered myth- through the collective subconscious that Jung mapped, the shared mythic resonance that lay buried in every human mind. Legend and myth, all tangled in an alphabet of trees remembered, not always with understanding, but with wonder. With awe.
-- Charles de Lint -
Only fools think they're wise; the rest of us just muddle through as we can.
-- Charles de Lint -
I've always been aware of the otherworld, of spirits that exist in that twilight place that lies in the corner of our eyes, of fairie and stranger things still that we spy only when we're not really paying attention to them, whispers and flickering shadows, here one moment, gone the instant we turn our heads for a closer look. But I couldn't always find them. And when I did, for a long time I thought they were only this excess of imagination that I carry around inside me, that somehow it was leaking out of me into the world.
-- Charles de Lint -
I don't think the world works on merit.
-- Charles de Lint -
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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 -
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 -
You can take the woman outta the trash, but you can't take the trash out a the woman.
-- Charles de Lint -
When you're invisible, no one can see that you're different.
-- Charles de Lint -
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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 -
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 -
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 -
The trouble with magic is that there's too much it just can't fix. When things go wrong, glimpsing junkyard faerie and crows that can turn into girls and back again doesn't help much. The useful magic's never at hand. The three wishes and the genies in bottles, seven-league boots, invisible cloaks and all. They stay in the stories, while out here in the wide world we have to muddle through as best we can on our own.
-- Charles de Lint -
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Everything is the way it is because we've all agreed that's the way it is.
-- Charles de Lint -
The puppet thinks: It's not so much what they make me do as their hands inside me.
-- Charles de Lint -
I wouldn't like to live in a world where everything's as cut-and-dried as most people think it is
-- Charles de Lint -
It's all those stories and how they braid together that tells us who and what and where we are
-- Charles de Lint -
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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 -
The thing with pretending you're in a good mood is that sometimes you can.
-- Charles de Lint -
I've always been interested in the outsider.
-- Charles de Lint -
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 -
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Write from the heart, what has meaning to you personally; have the patience and discipline to sit down and do it every day whether you're feeling inspired or not; never be afraid to take chances, in fact, make sure you take chances. As soon as you become complacent, you become boring ... . Read as much as possible, not simply in the genre, or what you think you're interested in, but other things as well.
-- Charles de Lint -
Under the skin, intense fires burn.
-- Charles de Lint -
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 -
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 -
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I think a good writer is a mix of confidence (sure that what they're writing is going to appeal to their readers) and uncertainty (what if all these words are crap?). If you're too confident, you get an attitude that seeps through into your writing, affecting the characters and the story. If you're too uncertain, you'll never finish anything.
-- Charles de Lint -
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 -
Living on the street as a kid changed the way I looked at everything. It was a different time and while it had its dangers, it was nothing like it would be today. It was the Summer of Love and there was a real sense of community among us. We were hippies who looked out for each other instead of trying to rip each other off. We only had to watch out for the police who liked to roust us just on general principles, and the kids who came in from the suburbs to do a little hippie-bashing.
-- Charles de Lint -
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 -
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My theory about writing is that one should write books you'd like to read, but no one else has written yet. So, as long as I stick with that, I'm entertaining myself, and then hopefully my readers as well. I hope to god I realize that I'm repeating myself, if I ever do. But if I don't, I'm sure my readers will let me know.
-- Charles de Lint -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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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 -
Fairy tales and mythology have always been an exaggerated distillation of the real world. Think of them as blueprints for how to deal with a multitude of situations that can arise in a person's life. The beauty of them is that their analogies resonate so deeply and they also entertain while they teach.
-- Charles de Lint -
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 -
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 -
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I was a misfit, but I think most teenagers feel that way. I don't care if you were a popular jock or the kid who spent his lunch hours in a stairwell reading a book, we all seem to have dealt with insecurities of one kind or another throughout our high school years.
-- Charles de Lint -
The best artists know what to leave out. They know how much of the support should show through as the pigment is applied, what details aren't necessary.
-- Charles de Lint -
What we take from the spirit world is only a reflection of what lies inside ourselves.
-- Charles de Lint -
There isn't a single day I don't do some writing -- if you don't, you won't have a book. When you're self-employed it is very easy to burn away your time instead -- answering e-mails, surfing the Internet, or hanging out with friends. You really must have the discipline to sit down and write every day. Most of what I am writing is living in the back of my head or in my subconscious. I find if I write every day, my subconscious will do the job for me.
-- Charles de Lint -
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The only real reason for self-referencing is the fun factor. It's fun for the writer, getting little peeks at what old characters might be up to. And it's fun for readers to spot a familiar face, or pick up on a made-up book title or something from an earlier story. I don't know that it does -- or even should -- contribute to the story in hand being any better than it would have been without it.
-- Charles de Lint -
By enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged.
-- Charles de Lint -
I was going through the motions of life, instead of really living, and there's no excuse for that. It's not something I'll let happen to me again.
-- Charles de Lint -
I believe a good writer can write a good book with any sort of character, in any sort of setting, but I prefer to write about the outsider. It might just be because I've been one (or perceived myself to be one) for so much of my life. But the simple fact of being marginalized immediately brings conflict to a story before the narrative even begins, and that's gold for a writer because it means that your character already has depth before events begin to unfold.
-- Charles de Lint -
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Labels don't mean much to me one way or another -- except when they close the minds of potential readers. I'd much rather we do away with genres and simply file everything under fiction. I know it can work -- one of my favourite record stores (Waterloo Music in Austin) simply files everything alphabetically and no one seems to have much problem finding what they're looking for.
-- Charles de Lint -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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