Charles de Lint Quotes - Page 4

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.

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.

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.

The trouble with advice is that it's usually something you don't want to hear.

It's not all about getting your own way. Sometimes there's a bigger picture.

If you're not ready to die, then how can you live?

The moon likes secrets," Meran said. "And secret things. She lets mysteries bleed into her shadows and leaves us to ask whether they originated from otherworlds, or from our own imaginations.

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

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

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.

All forests have their own personality. I don't just mean the obvious differences, like how an English woodland is different from a Central American rain forest, or comparing tracts of West Coast redwoods to the saguaro forests of the American Southwest... they each have their own gossip, their own sound, their own rustling whispers and smells. A voice speaks up when you enter their acres that can't be mistaken for one you'd hear anyplace else, a voice true to those particular tress, individual rather than of their species.

I love this world ... That is what rules my life. When I die, I want to have done all in my power to leave it in a better state than it was in when I found it. At the same time I know that this can never be. The world has grown so complex that one voice can do little to alter it any longer. That doesn't stop me from doing what I can but it makes the task hard. The successes are so small, the failures so large and many. It's like trying to stem a storm with one's bare hands.

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.

By enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged.

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

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.

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

You can take the woman outta the trash, but you can't take the trash out a the woman.

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.

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.

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.

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?

As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.

The puppet thinks: It's not so much what they make me do as their hands inside me.

I've always been interested in the outsider.