Charles de Lint Quotes

When you're touched by magic, nothing's ever quite the same again. What really makes me sad is all those people who never have the chance to know that touch. They're too busy, or they just don't hold with make-believe, so they shut the door without really knowing it was there to be opened in the first place.

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

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.

It reminded me of that tongue-in-cheek quick history of art I'd overheard...Used to be people couldn't draw very well, then they could, and now they can't again.

Dying doesn't end anything - it just changes where you are

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.

"We are wise women," Abuela liked to say. "Not because we are wise, but because we seek wisdom."

Life's an act of magic, too. Claire Hamill sings a line in one of her songs that really sums it up for me: 'If there's no magic, there's no meaning.' Without magic- or call it wonder, mystery, natural wisdom- nothing has any depth. It's all just surface. You know: what you see is what you get. I honestly believe there's more to everything than that, whether it's a Monet hanging in a gallery or some old vagrant sleeping in an alley.

The best artists know what to leave out.

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

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.

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.

Ghosts were just a way that some stupid people dealt with their dull lives.

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.

A long time ago a bunch of people reached a general consensus as to what’s real and what’s not and most of us have been going along with it ever since.