Charles de Lint Quotes

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

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.

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

But while the tale itself, its truth, is of the utmost importance, it is the telling that allows it to be remembered or forgotten. The trueness of the telling is what makes up a storyteller’s craft.

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.

"But if I could just get som ehint, some sign..."
Conchita smiles, without humor, but with great affection. "That's the point behind faith," she says. "It's not something you can prove....I know you hate to hear this, but you either have it, or you don't."

We got to stop asking for things, stop waiting for people to give us the things we think we need. All we really need is the stories. We have the stories and they’ll give us the one thing nobody else can, the thing we can only take for ourselves, because there’s nobody can give you back your pride. You’ve got to take it back yourself.

He had seen trances before — wise men far in the east, who could feign death; a herbwife as she bent over her patient, searching for invisible hurts. But this was different. He could sense something here, within the circle cast by the light of the fire. A presence. Presences...

It's easy to believe in magic when you're young. Anything you couldn't explain was magic then. It didn't matter if it was science or a fairy tale. Electricity and elves were both infinitely mysterious and equally possible - elves probably more so.

You're confusing me."
"But not deliberately so," Coyote says. "Let it go on record that any confusion arose simply because we lacked certain commonalities of reference.

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's enough weirdness in the world as it is without having to give it supernatural trappings, don't you think?

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.

That's the thing with magic. You've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you.

That was the trouble with not paying attention to money. It was never there when you needed it.