Top 200 Charles de Lint Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “It’s not all about getting your own way. Sometimes there’s a bigger picture.”

— Charles de Lint

103. “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

104. “Under the skin, intense fires burn.”

— Charles de Lint

105. “There are few joys to compare with the telling of a well-told tale.”

— Charles de Lint

106. “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

107. “The thing to remember when you’re writing is, it’s not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It’s whether it wakes a truth in your reader.”

— Charles de Lint

108. “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

109. “On a quiet day, when the wind was still, the creek could be heard all the way up to where the old beech stood. Under its branches, cats would come to dream and be dreamed.”

— Charles de Lint

110. “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

111. “Kindness is important, my little wren,” he would tell her. “Doesn’t matter how poor you are, you can still be kind.”

— Charles de Lint

112. “The puppet thinks: It’s not so much what they make me do as their hands inside me.”

— Charles de Lint

113. “I’m not Chinese. I thrive in interesting times.”

— Charles de Lint

114. “Everything’s hard, if it means anything.”

— Charles de Lint

115. “It is important to know what a person was. But it’s more important to know what they are now.”

— Charles de Lint

116. “We have not inherited the earth from our fathers, we are borrowing it from our children.”

— Charles de Lint

117. “What we take from the spirit world is only a reflection of what lies inside ourselves.”

— Charles de Lint

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “The excitement I get from writing is finding out each day what happens next.”

— Charles de Lint

122. “I swear that all dogs are born knowing certain words. Walk. Eat. Good dog. The important stuff.”

— Charles de Lint

123. “One cannot seek to uphold honor in a being that has none.”

— Charles de Lint

124. “Nothing strikes me as truly weird,” Jilly told him. “There’s only stuff I haven’t figured out yet.”

— Charles de Lint

125. “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

126. “But what the evil people do, that’s their responsibility. The burden they have to carry. Sure, when we see ’em starting on causing some hurt, we’ve got to try and stop ’em, but mostly what the rest of us should be concerning ourselves with is doing right by others. Every time you do a good turn, you shine the light a little further into the dark. And the thing is, even when we’re gone, that light’s going to keep shining on, pushing the shadows back.”

— Charles de Lint

127. “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

128. “Witchery is merely a word for what we are all capable of.”

— Charles de Lint

129. “All my life I’ve wanted to be the kid who gets to cross over into the magical kingdom.”

— Charles de Lint

130. “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

131. “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

132. “As the new work fills my notebooks, I’ve come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed.”

— Charles de Lint

133. “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

134. “There was too much going on here – too much that strayed from odd all the way over into seriously weird.”

— Charles de Lint

135. “The trouble with magic is that it never really lets go. If you work one magic to undo another, you might end up with a bigger problem than you had in the first place.”

— Charles de Lint

136. “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

137. “I think you’re all mad. But that’s part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn’t it?”

— Charles de Lint

138. “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

139. “The past scampers like an alleycat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter – here ink is smeared on a page, there lies an old photograph with a chewed corner, elsewhere still, a nest has been made of old newspapers, the headlines running one into the other to make strange declarations.”

— Charles de Lint

140. “The real trouble comes from not knowing what we really want in the first place.”

— Charles de Lint

141. “I don’t think the world works on merit.”

— Charles de Lint

142. “You could only make art by setting it free. Anything else was just a memory, no matter how you stored it. On film or paper, sculpted or recorded.”

— Charles de Lint

143. “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

144. “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

145. “Writing music uses a whole different process that involves a lot of noodling and just seeing what comes.”

— Charles de Lint

146. “Wondering’s healthy. Broadens the mind. Opens you up to all sorts of stray thoughts and possibilities.”

— Charles de Lint

147. “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

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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