110+ Charles de Lint Quotes On Friendship, Education And Order

Charles de Lint is a Canadian fantasy writer. He is best known for his work in the urban fantasy genre, combining elements of fantasy, myth and folklore in his writing. He has written over 60 books, including novels, collections of short stories, and poetry. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Charles de Lint on love, life, friendship.

Top 10 Charles De Lint Quotes

1. 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.
2. It's all those stories and how they braid together that tells us who and what and where we are
3. 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.
4. I'm not Chinese. I thrive in interesting times.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Magic lies in between things, between the day and the night, between yellow and blue, between any two things.
9. 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.
10. There are people who take the heart out of you, and there are people who put it back.

Charles De Lint Short Quotes

• We call them faerie. We don't believe in them. Our loss.
• There's never an easy route to the things that matter.
• If you're not ready to die, then how can you live?
• There are few joys to compare with the telling of a well-told tale.
• The thing with pretending you're in a good mood is that sometimes you can.
• You can't stand up to the night until you understand what's hiding in its shadows.
• The best artists know what to leave out.
• The puppet thinks: It's not so much what they make me do as their hands inside me.
• Only fools think they're wise; the rest of us just muddle through as we can.
• When you're invisible, no one can see that you're different.

Charles de Lint Quotes About Life

The real problem is, people think life is a ladder, and it's really a wheel. — Charles de Lint

There's more to life than just surviving . . . but . . . sometimes just surviving is all you get — Charles de Lint

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

That's the thing with magic. You've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you. — Charles de Lint

The magic in this world seems to work in whispers and small kindnesses. — 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

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

An now the silences come in a single lifetime, in a single year... when species die, leaving a silent space in the world song that can never be filled. — Charles de Lint

Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. With my writing... sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it highlights something I’m working on, sometimes it simply helps me stay in the narrative mood. — Charles de Lint

Charles de Lint Quotes About His Heart

I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile. — Charles de Lint

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

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

Tattoos...are the stories in your heart, written on your skin. — Charles de Lint

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

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

Charles de Lint Quotes About Magic

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

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

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

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

I believe in a different kind of magic. The kind we make between each other. — 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

Magic's never what you expect it to be, but it's often what you need. — Charles de Lint

Gina always believed there was magic in the world. "But it doesn't work in the way it does in fairy tales," she told me. "It doesn't save us. We have to save ourselves. — Charles de Lint

Like legend and myth, magic fades when it is unused. — Charles de Lint

All my life I've wanted to be the kid who gets to cross over into the magical kingdom. — Charles de Lint

Charles de Lint Quotes About World

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

The fey wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them. — Charles de Lint

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

I don't think the world works on merit. — Charles de Lint

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

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

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

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 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

Charles de Lint Quotes About People

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

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

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

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. — Charles de Lint

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

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

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

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

Well, you know this world isn't perfect.' 'No, you're wrong. This world IS perfect, people just come along and mess it up sometimes. — Charles de Lint

It reminded me of that tongue-in-cheek quick history of art I'd overheard...Used to be people couldn't draw very well, then they could, and now they can't again. — Charles de Lint

Charles de Lint Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

Beauty isn't what you see on TV or in magazine ads or even necessarily in art galleries. It's a lot deeper and a lot simpler than that. It's realizing the goodness of things, it's leaving the world a little better than it was before you got here. It's appreciating the inspiration of the world around you and trying to inspire others. — 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

Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I'd dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I'd listen to cool jazz in clubs, getting up to read devastating truths from my notebook, leaning against the microphone, cigarette dangling from my hand. — Charles de Lint

The thing with pretending you're in a good mood is that sometimes you can actually trick yourself into feeling better. — 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

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

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

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

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

I think you're all mad. But that's part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn't it? — Charles de Lint

When you're touched by magic, nothing's ever quite the same again. What really makes me sad is all those people who never have the chance to know that touch. They're too busy, or they just don't hold with make-believe, so they shut the door without really knowing it was there to be opened in the first place. — Charles de Lint

Under the skin, intense fires burn. — Charles de Lint

The problem with children is that you have to put up with their parents. — Charles de Lint

It was all cheese and applause. — 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

The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter. — Charles de Lint

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

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

The excitement I get from writing is finding out each day what happens next. — 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

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

Dying doesn't end anything - it just changes where you are — Charles de Lint

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

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. — Charles de Lint

By enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged. — Charles de Lint

It's not something you can prove....I know you hate to hear this, but you either have it, or you don't. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One expected growth, change; without it, the world was less, the well of inspiration dried up, the muses fled. — Charles de Lint

You've got to find yourself first. Everything else'll follow. — Charles de Lint

Life's an act of magic, too. Claire Hamill sings a line in one of her songs that really sums it up for me: 'If there's no magic, there's no meaning.' Without magic- or call it wonder, mystery, natural wisdom- nothing has any depth. It's all just surface. You know: what you see is what you get. I honestly believe there's more to everything than that, whether it's a Monet hanging in a gallery or some old vagrant sleeping in an alley. — Charles de Lint

There are no happy endings... There are no endings, happy or otherwise. We all have our own stories which are just part of the one Story that binds both this world and Faerie. Sometimes we step into each others stories - perhaps just for a few minutes, perhaps for years - and then we step out of them again. But all the while, the Story just goes on. — Charles de Lint

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

I find the characters in my head and the more I write about them, the better I get to know them. — Charles de Lint

The best change you can make is to hold up a mirror so that people can look into it and change themselves. That's the only way a person can be changed." By looking into yourself," Zia said. "Even if you have to look into a mirror that's outside yourself to do it." "And you know," Maida added. "That mirror can be a story you hear, or just someone else's eyes. Anything that reflects back so you can see yourself in it. — Charles de Lint

A body of work may be reviled - mostly by those who have no knowledge of its workings - and yet still carry elements of what can only be considered eternal truths. — Charles de Lint

I'm not...' Angharad began, but then she thought. Not what? Not a bad person? Perhaps. But had she never known anger? Never held unkind thoughts? The stranger's observation was valid. No one was innocent of darkness. — 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

The old gods and their magics did not dwindle away into murky memories of brownies and little fairies more at home in a Disney cartoon; rather, they changed. The coming of Christ and Christians actually freed them. They were no longer bound to people's expectations but could now become anything that they could imagine themselves to be. They are still here, walking among us. We just don't recognize them anymore. — Charles de Lint

Everything is the way it is because we've all agreed that's the way it is. — Charles de Lint

The thing I like so much about short stories is that there isn't as much of an investment of time so I'm free to experiment more. If it doesn't work out, I've only lost a week or two of work. If I screw up a novel I've lost at least a year's worth of work. But the nice thing is that those experiments with short stories can be carried over to novels when the experiments do work. — Charles de Lint

Writing music uses a whole different process that involves a lot of noodling and just seeing what comes. — Charles de Lint

I've always been interested in the outsider. — Charles de Lint

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

[She] had felt straight away that she wasn’t meeting a new friend, but recognizing an old one. — Charles de Lint

We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. — Charles de Lint

Life Lessons by Charles de Lint

1. Charles de Lint's work emphasizes the importance of imagination and creativity, and how it can be used to explore new worlds and possibilities.
2. His stories often explore themes of identity, culture, and the power of community, showing how people can come together to create something special.
3. His work is a reminder that our own unique perspectives and experiences can be used to create something beautiful and meaningful.