Charles de Lint Quotes

Most times we only see things for the way we are. But we're good at lying to ourselves. Sometimes we need somebody who's not living in our skin to point out how things really are.

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?

If all the darkness each of us carries within us, all our angers and unhappiness and bad moments were pulled out of us and given shape, we would all create monsters.

The problem with children is that you have to put up with their parents.

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.

I don't know why I care what people write about me after I'm dead, except that since I invest so much of my time telling the truth in my fiction, I'd hate to see someone play fast and loose with the pieces of my life. I don't care what they might think of me; but I don't want lies about my life used to invalidate the stories. 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.

While he was out of the room, Tucker sauntered over to the worktable and had a look at the poetry. He read a line here and there, but couldn’t make a lot of sense out of any of it. That was the trouble with poems. It seemed you had to have a doctorate just to understand the references. Still. Some of it had a nice ring to it. …like Manjushri, I have met death,
and bear my own victory,
though not a sword… Nice. Yeah. If you knew what the hell it meant.

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

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.

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.

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

I watched the people passing below, each of them a story, each story part of somebody else's, all of it connected to the big story of the world. People weren't islands, so far as I was concerned. How could they be, when their stories kept getting tangled up in everybody else's?

Don't you ever watch TV?
Jilly shook her head. "What? And let the aliens monitor my brain waves?"

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.

The real problem is, people think life is a ladder, and it’s really a wheel.