Charles de Lint Quotes

The Lost Music was his way of talking about the way he believed that old wives' tales and dance tunes and folktales were just the tangled echoes of something that's not quite of this world … something we all knew once, but have forgotten since.

Everybody makes the same mistake. 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 that you can get a good look at it.

Those who live forever, who have no stake in the dance of death’s inevitable approach, can never understand the sanctity of life.

You've got to find yourself first. Everything else'll follow.

There was nothing wrong with being a homebody. There was nothing wrong with not wanting - not needing - the constant jostle and noise of a party or bar or... whatever.

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.

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.

Time does more than erode a riverbank or wear mountains down into tired hills. It takes the edge from our memories as well, overlaying everything with a soft focus so that it all blurs together. What really happened gets all jumbled up with the hopes and dreams we once had and what we wish had really happened.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Remember the quiet wonders. The world has more need of them than it has for warriors. And this I will tell you as well: One cannot seek to uphold honor in a being that has none.

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

Who is he?" she asked. "Or maybe I should be asking what is he?"
"I've always thought of him as a kind of anima, Jilly said. "A loose bit of myth that got left behind when all the others went on to wherever it is that myths go when we don't believe in them anymore.