"Sometimes we wonder what it's like to feel normal," Maida said. "You know, like all the people you see out on the streets or sitting in their little… - Charles de Lint

The Lost Music was his way of talking about the way he believed that old wives' tales and dance tunes and folktales were just the tangled echoes of something that's not quite of this world … something we all knew once, but have forgotten since.

I finally figured out that I’m solitary by nature, but at the same time I know so many people; so many people think they own a piece of me. They shift and move under my skin, like a parade of memories that simply won’t go away. It doesn’t matter where I am, or how alone — I always have such a crowded head.

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.