Charles de Lint Quotes

Look, I’m sorry if I don’t measure up to how people want me to be, but this is just the way I am.

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.

"I do know that the gardens of the first lands are still lying there, right under the skin of the world- pulsing the way our heartbeat drums under our own skin. And I believe that there's a connectedness between everything that gives some people a deep and abiding affinity to a certain kind of place or creature."
"Like totems?"
"Maybe. Or maybe something even more personal- something that's impossible to articulate with the vocabulary we have at the moment."
"This is too weird."
Annie shrugged. "What can I say? It's getting late, the stars are out. Once the sun sets, I tend to embrace whatever wild spirits are running around in the darkness, talking away to each other. I leave the logic of streets and pavement and cars and tall buildings behind and buy into the old magics that they're whispering about. Sometimes those little mysteries and bits of wisdom stick to the bones of my head and I carry them right out into the sunlight again. They're like Jack's stories, true and not true, all at the same time. They don't exactly shape my life, but they certainly colour it." She glanced at him, "I wouldn't like to live in a world where everything's as cut-and-dried as most people think it is"

That dichotomy between who she was and who she thought she should be was what really killed her.

All my life I've wanted to be the kid who gets to cross over into the magical kingdom. I devoured those books by C.S. Lewis and William Dunthorn, Ellen Wentworth, Susan Cooper, and Alan Garner. When I could get them from the library, I read them out of order as I found them, and then in order, and then reread them all again, many times over. Because even when I was a child I knew it wasn't simply escape that lay on the far side of the borders of fairyland. Instinctively I knew crossing over would mean more than fleeing the constant terror and shame that was mine at that time of my life. There was a knowledge – an understanding hidden in the marrow of my bones that only I can access — telling me that by crossing over, I'd be coming home.
That's the reason I’ve yearned so desperately to experience the wonder, the mystery, the beauty of that world beyond the World As It Is. It's because I know that somewhere across the border there's a place for me. A place of safety and strength and learning, where I can become who I'm supposed to be. I've tried forever to be that person here, but whatever I manage to accomplish in the World As It Is only seems to be an echo of what I could be in that other place that lies hidden somewhere beyond the borders.

There are people who take the heart out of you, and there are people who put it back.

While you live … you have a duty to life. … The fey wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them. … Otherwise they fade away.

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

"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.

I'm not as trusting as people think I am. Sure, I see the best in people, but that doesn't mean it's really there.

They have alls these laws and social boundaries to keep the worst of them in check. The problem is, villains and bullies just ignore that kind of thing.

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.

And just because she and her uncle were loaded, that didn’t automatically make them useless as human beings.

The minutes dragged by as they only did when you had no choice but to wait for something.

In one form or another, it was one of the first implements created by ancient people to give voice to the mysteries that words cannot encompass, but that they had a need to express; only the drum was older.