Top 200 Charles de Lint Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 5

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

— Charles de Lint

52. “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

53. “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

54. “Like legend and myth, magic fades when it is unused.”

— Charles de Lint

55. “Not only do we all have magic, it’s all around us as well. We just don’t pay attention to it. Every time we make something out of nothing, that’s an act of magic. It doesn’t matter if it’s a painting or a garden, or an abuelo telling his grandchildren some tall tale. Every time we fix something that’s broken, whether it’s a car engine or a broken heart, that’s an act of magic.”

— Charles de Lint

56. “Why is it so easy to spread sadness and so hard to spread happiness?”

— Charles de Lint

57. “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

58. “If everybody really and truly treated each other the way they’d want to be treated, all the problems of the world would be solved. Nobody would starve, because nobody’d want to go hungry themselves. Nobody would steal, or kill, or hurt each other, because they wouldn’t want that to happen to themselves.”

— Charles de Lint

59. “We make a difference in the world. For good or bad, whether we want to or not, we make a difference. And I think it’s our choices that make the difference.”

— Charles de Lint

60. “Everything is the way it is because we’ve all agreed that’s the way it is.”

— Charles de Lint

61. “I wonder if the world’s getting worse, or if we’re just paying more attention to the shadows.”

— Charles de Lint

62. “It’s not fair.” “Well, you know what Jools says about fair.” Sara shook her head. “It’s just the first third of fairy tale and you won’t find either in the real world.”

— Charles de Lint

63. “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

64. “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

65. “Magic lies in between things, between the day and the night, between yellow and blue, between any two things.”

— Charles de Lint

66. “The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter.”

— Charles de Lint

67. “Once upon a time there was what there was, and if nothing had happened there would be nothing to tell.”

— Charles de Lint

68. “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

69. “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

70. “There is no plan, no future laid out for any of us beyond what we make for ourselves.”

— Charles de Lint

71. “The thing with pretending you’re in a good mood is that sometimes you can.”

— Charles de Lint

72. “I always feel that there is a curtain, you know, that if I could just peek behind the curtain I’d see how the world really works. And since I haven’t had it I have to write about it instead.”

— Charles de Lint

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

— Charles de Lint

74. “Witchery is merely a word for what we are all capable of – heightened nightsight, an empathy shared with the beasts, a utilization of the more obscure abilities of our minds. Nothing that science can’t explain away. Wizardry is spells and enchantments. Fairy tales.”

— Charles de Lint

75. “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

76. “We got to stop asking for things, stop waiting for people to give us the things we think we need. All we really need is the stories. We have the stories and they’ll give us the one thing nobody else can, the thing we can only take for ourselves, because there’s nobody can give you back your pride. You’ve got to take it back yourself.”

— Charles de Lint

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “We call them faerie. We don’t believe in them. Our loss.”

— Charles de Lint

82. “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

83. “Nothing’s free in this world,” Zeffy told her, “except leftovers and friendship, and even friendship costs. The difference is, usually we don’t mind paying the coin it requires.”

— Charles de Lint

84. “The best artists know what to leave out.”

— Charles de Lint

85. “It was all cheese and applause.”

— 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. “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

88. “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

89. “You lose your pride and you lose everything. We don’t want to know the stories, because we don’t want to remember. But we’ve got to take the good with the bad and make ourselves whole again, be proud again. A proud people can never be defeated. They lose battles, but they’ll never lose the war, because for them to lose the war you’ve got to go out and kill each and every one of them, everybody with even a drop of the blood. And even then, the stories will go on.”

— Charles de Lint

90. “Ghosts were just a way that some stupid people dealt with their dull lives.”

— Charles de Lint

91. “You’d be okay with somebody eating you?” She shrugs. “If I’m stupid enough to get caught, sure. Everybody’s got to eat.” “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that idea.” “Nobody goes looking for it. But life isn’t ours to keep. We only get to hold it for a little bit and then we’ve got to pass it on.”

— Charles de Lint

92. “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

93. “I believe in a different kind of magic. The kind we make between each other.”

— Charles de Lint

94. “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

95. “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

96. “We’re all beings of power. Some of us are strong, some weak. Every mistake that we learn something from, makes us stronger. As does every sacrifice, every good deed. That’s how we learn. Our power is the sum of all we have been and all we are. When you take responsibility for somebody else’s decisions, or actions, you take away their power. And when you take away somebody’s power, you leave them spinning wheels when they could be moving forward.”

— Charles de Lint

97. “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

98. “Because the bottom line is, I believe I can make a difference. Not a big one. What I do is just a small ripple, but I know it helps. And if enough little people like me make our small differences, one day we’re going to wake up to find that we really did manage to change the world.”

— Charles de Lint

99. “I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile.”

— Charles de Lint

100. “You walk around with a negative attitude and you’re just naturally going to bring trouble and hard times down on yourself.”

— Charles de Lint