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Charles de Lint QUOTES

Charles de Lint QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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 , Dreams Underfoot (Newford, #1)

3 " 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 , Dreams Underfoot (Newford, #1)

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " I'm a writer and this is what I do no matter what name we put to it. Year by year, the world is turning into a darker and stranger place than any of us could want. This is the only thing I do that has potential to shine a little further than my immediate surroundings. For me, each story is a little candle held up to the dark of night, trying to illuminate the hope for a better world where we all respect and care for each other. "

― Charles de Lint

7 " I read and write for character. If I like and can relate to the characters in a story I can enjoy any kind of story. I also want something with a definitive plot—you know, beginning, middle and end--that has forward motion. I don’t like series books that leave you hanging after you’ve finished a book and in my own fiction I try to make sure that there’s always an entry point for those who are new to the book as well as long-time readers. "

― Charles de Lint

8 " 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 , Dreams Underfoot (Newford, #1)

9 " 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 , Dreams Underfoot (Newford, #1)

10 " 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

11 " So she goes to see the Old Man of the Mountains–looks just like you, Bear. Same face, same hair. A big old bear, sitting up there on the top of the mountain, looking out at everything below. Doesn’t smile so much, but understands how everybody’s got a secret dark place sits way deep down there inside, hidden but wanting to get out. Understands how you can be happy but not happy at the same time. Understands that sometimes you feel you got to go all the way out to get back in, but if you do, you can’t. There’s no way back in. "

― Charles de Lint

12 " She knew this music--knew it down to the very core of her being--but she had never heard it before. Unfamiliar, it had still always been there inside her, waiting to be woken. It grew from the core of mystery that gives a secret its special delight, religion its awe. It demanded to be accepted by simple faith, not dissected or questioned, and at the same time, it begged to be doubted and probed. "

― Charles de Lint , The Little Country

13 " 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

14 " T.H. moved through the forest like the melody of a well-known song, in perfect harmony with his surroundings. "

― Charles de Lint

15 " Everybody's got a true home—maybe not where they're living, but
where their heart lives. "

― Charles de Lint , Someplace to Be Flying (Newford, #5)

16 " 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 , The Blue Girl (Newford, #15)

17 " 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 , The Blue Girl (Newford, #15)

18 " The real difference is that with fantasy—and by that I mean fantasy which can simultaneously tap into a cosmopolitan commonality at the same time as it springs from an individual and unique perspective. In this sort of fantasy, a mythic resonance lingers on—an harmonious vibration that builds in potency the longer one considers it, rather than fading away when the final page is read and the book is put away. Characters discovered in such writing are pulled from our own inner landscapes... and then set out upon the stories' various stages so that as we learn to understand them a little better, both the monsters and the angels, we come to understand ourselves a little better as well. "

― Charles de Lint

19 " Everything is the way it is because we've all agreed that's the way it is. "

― Charles de Lint , The Onion Girl (Newford, #8)

20 " 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