Charles de Lint Quotes

You walk around with a negative attitude and you're just naturally going to bring trouble and hard times down on yourself.

"There's no such thing as fiction", Annie told him once. "If you can imagine something, then it's happened."

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

Our lives are stories, and the stories we have to give to each other are the most important. No one has a story too small and all are of equal stature. We each tell them in different ways, through different mediums — and if we care about each other, we'll take the time to listen.

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.

"Don't start brooding about that, too," she says. "Everybody's got a piece of stranger inside them. It's what lets us surprise ourselves and keeps things interesting." -Lupita

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.

I suppose the other thing too many forget is that we were all stories once, each and every one of us. And we remain stories. But too often we allow those stories to grow banal, or cruel or unconnected to each other.We allow the stories to continue, but they no longer have a heart. They no longer sustain us.

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

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

"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."

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.

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.

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.

From the first time he’d met her, he’d sensed an air of contradiction about her. She was very much a woman, but still retained a waiflike quality. She could be brash, and at times deliberately suggestive, yet she was painfully shy. She was incredibly easy to get along with, yet she had few friends. She was a talented artist in her own right, but so self-conscious about her work that she rarely completed a piece and preferred to work with other people’s art and ideas...