Charles de Lint Quotes

As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.

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.

I was going through the motions of life, instead of really living, and there’s no excuse for that. It’s not something I’ll let happen to me again.

I realize that for all my penchant in believing that there's more to the world than what we can see, that folk tales and fairy tales are based on real, if forgotten events, I never accepted that part of it as being real.

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

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

"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

Sara Kendell once read somewhere that the tale of the world is like a tree. The tale, she understood, did not so much mean the niggling occurrences of daily life. Rather it encompassed the grand stories that caused some change in the world and were remembered in ensuing years as, if not histories, at least folktales and myths. By such reasoning, Winston Churchill could take his place in British folklore alongside the legendary Robin Hood; Merlin Ambrosius had as much validity as Martin Luther. The scope of their influence might differ, but they were all a part of the same tale.

We end up stumbling our way through the forest, never seeing all the unexpected and wonderful possibilities and potentials because we're looking for the idea of a tree, instead of appreciating the actual trees in front of us.

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.

I hate the thought of her being forced into a box that doesn't fit her. Of having her wings cut off, her sight blinded, her hearing muted, her voice stilled.

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?

"There's something wrong inside of me," she said. "I don't know at it is. It feels big and heavy and sometimes it makes it hard to breathe." She lifted her hands eyes. "And tears keep leaking out of my eyes. Is this what sadness feels like?" "That's what it feels like for me." I replied. "It's funny. I've heard about it in a lot of the stories I've collected, but I never knew it felt like this before." She sighed "it's so heavy......"
"I know." I replied "I know."

Let me give you some advice: Try to approach things without preconceived ideas, without supposing you already know everything there is to know about them. Get that trick down and you'll be surprised at what's really all around you.

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.