Charles de Lint Quotes

The lonesome dark.
That's what Jack called a night like this. When you were distanced from everything and everybody. Out on your own and there was nobody to care if you were happy or sad. If you lived or died.
The lonesome dark hadn't existed in the old days. That was something people invented. Like time. Parcel up the days, parcel up the seasons. Add a minute here, a day there when it doesn't quite fit. Trim the square peg so that you could slide it into the round hole. In the old days the night was as open as the day. It wasn't a better place to hide because there was nothing to hide from. You weren't outside because there was no in.

Even, she thought, even without the gift of witchsight, there was more beauty to be found in the world than could ever be snared in language or music. And with the sight...

She wanted to tell him what happened wasn't really his fault, but she knew that wasn't the way this kind of guilt worked. Intellectually, he already knew that. It was his emotions that were tripping him up. The tangle of love and memory and what might have been.

It may sound trite, but using the weapons of the enemy, no matter how good one's intentions, makes one the enemy.

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.

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.

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.

I've always believed the lies we use to make our fictions reveal the truth with far more honesty than any history or herstory or life story.

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

Have you ever noticed' I said 'how everyone says they want to be different, but as soon as they meet someone who really is different, they ostracize them?

What I’ve got to talk about, I don’t think a priest wants to hear. What does a priest know or care about secular concerns? All they want to talk about is God. All they want to hear is a tidy list of sins so that they can prescribe their penances and get on to the next customer.

There were two forests for every one you entered. There was the one you walked in, the physical echo, and then there was the one that was connected to all the other forests, with no consideration of distance, or time.

The forest primeval, remembered through the collective memory of every tree in the same way that people remembered myth- through the collective subconscious that Jung mapped, the shared mythic resonance that lay buried in every human mind. Legend and myth, all tangled in an alphabet of trees remembered, not always with understanding, but with wonder. With awe.

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.

Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I'd dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I'd listen to cool jazz in clubs, getting up to read devastating truths from my notebook, leaning against the microphone, cigarette dangling from my hand.

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