Charles de Lint (born December 22, 1951) is a Canadian writer of Dutch origins. In 1974 he met MaryAnn Harris, and married her in 1980. They live in Canada.
. . . we chase after ghosts and spirits and are left holding only memories and dreams. It's not that we want what we can't have; it's that we've held all we could want and then had to watch it slip away.
It's not the work or the personality of the founder of a religion that's important, but what its followers do with what they learn.
There are no happy endings. . . There are no endings, happy or otherwise. We all have our own stories which are just part of the one Story that binds both this world and Faerie. Sometimes we step into each others stories - perhaps just for a few minutes, perhaps for years - and then we step out of them again. But all the while, the Story just goes on.
When you're invisible, no one can see that you're different.
You know how we'd get along better? If everybody'd just remember how we're all related. White, black, Asian, skin. No difference. All the bloodlines go back to that one old mama in Africa.
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.
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 do believe in an everyday sort of magic -- the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we're alone.
I've always been aware of the otherworld, of spirits that exist in that twilight place that lies in the corner of our eyes, of fairie and stranger things still that we spy only when we're not really paying attention to them, whispers and flickering shadows, here one moment, gone the instant we turn our heads for a closer look. But I couldn't always find them. And when I did, for a long time I thought they were only this excess of imagination that I carry around inside me, that somehow it was leaking out of me into the world.
I was a misfit, but I think most teenagers feel that way. I don't care if you were a popular jock or the kid who spent his lunch hours in a stairwell reading a book, we all seem to have dealt with insecurities of one kind or another throughout our high school years.
You've got to find yourself first. Everything else'll follow.
I like living in the city where I have all my books and music and can go out to buy that night's dinner or easily see a band. But I also like the wild places, especially hiking in the desert and the Eastern woodlands. Do I have to choose?
As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.
You can take the woman outta the trash, but you can't take the trash out a the woman.
The real problem is, people think life is a ladder, and it's really a wheel.
The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter.
It is important to know what a person was. But it's more important to know what they are now.
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 suppose the other thing too many forget is that we were all stories once, each and every one of us. And we remain stories. But too often we allow those stories to grow banal, or cruel or unconnected to each other. We allow the stories to continue, but they no longer have a heart. They no longer sustain us.
Everybody's got the potential for great good and great wrong in them, but it's the choices we make that define who we really are.