Top 200 Charles de Lint Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “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

4. “Life is like art. You have to work hard to keep it simple and still have meaning.”

— Charles de Lint

5. “You’ve got to find yourself first. Everything else’ll follow.”

— Charles de Lint

6. “Our lives are stories, and the stories we have to give to each other are the most important. No one has a story too small and all are of equal stature. We each tell them in different ways, through different mediums – and if we care about each other, we’ll take the time to listen.”

— Charles de Lint

7. “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

8. “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

9. “There’s never an easy route to the things that matter.”

— Charles de Lint

10. “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

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

— Charles de Lint

12. “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

13. “Not everything has to mean something. Some things just are.”

— Charles de Lint

14. “Wisdom never comes to those who believe they have nothing left to learn.”

— Charles de Lint

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “The family we choose for ourselves is more important than the one we were born into; that people have to earn our respect and trust, not have it handed to them simply because of genetics.”

— Charles de Lint

19. “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

20. “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

21. “The real problem is, people think life is a ladder, and it’s really a wheel.”

— Charles de Lint

22. “Every time we fix something that broken, whether it’s a car engine or a broken heart, that an act of magic. And what makes it magic is that we choose to create or help, just as we can choose to harm.”

— Charles de Lint

23. “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

24. “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

25. “Remember the quiet wonders. The world has more need of them than it has for warriors.”

— Charles de Lint

26. “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

27. “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

28. “You can take the woman outta the trash, but you can’t take the trash out a the woman.”

— Charles de Lint

29. “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

30. “You can’t stand up to the night until you understand what’s hiding in its shadows.”

— Charles de Lint

31. “If you’re not ready to die, then how can you live?”

— Charles de Lint

32. “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

33. “The trouble with advice is that it’s usually something you don’t want to hear.”

— Charles de Lint

34. “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

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

— Charles de Lint

36. “In the dark attics of our minds, all times mingle.”

— Charles de Lint

37. “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

38. “The road leading to a goal does not separate you from the destination; it is essentially a part of it.”

— Charles de Lint

39. “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

40. “Only fools think they’re wise; the rest of us just muddle through as we can.”

— Charles de Lint

41. “The magic in this world seems to work in whispers and small kindnesses.”

— Charles de Lint

42. “The fey wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them.”

— Charles de Lint

43. “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

44. “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

45. “Magic’s never what you expect it to be, but it’s often what you need.”

— Charles de Lint

46. “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

47. “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

48. “It’s all those stories and how they braid together that tells us who and what and where we are.”

— Charles de Lint

49. “Magic’s all around if you take the time to pay attention.”

— Charles de Lint

50. “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