Canadian writer (1951- )
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.
CHARLES DE LINT
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The Little Country
The family we choose for ourselves is more important than the one we were born into ... people have to earn our respect and trust, not have it handed to them simply because of genetics.
CHARLES DE LINT
Moonlight & Vines
I don't know what's waiting for us when we die--something better, something worse. I only know I'm not ready to find out yet.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
All my life I've wanted to be the kid who gets to cross over into the magical kingdom.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
The excitement I get from writing is finding out each day what happens next.
CHARLES DE LINT
"One Thing Leads to Another: An Interview with Charles de Lint", The Yalsa Hub, September 19, 2013
As the new work fills my notebooks, I've come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed.
CHARLES DE LINT
Dreams Underfoot
The trouble with magic is that there's too much it just can't fix. When things go wrong, glimpsing junkyard faerie and crows that can turn into girls and back again doesn't help much. The useful magic's never at hand. The three wishes and the genies in bottles, seven-league boots, invisible cloaks and all. They stay in the stories, while out here in the wide world we have to muddle through as best we can on our own.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
You can take the woman outta the trash, but you can't take the trash out a the woman.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
I'm really bad at describing my books. Journalists like to have things like "It's The Terminator Meets the Seven Dwarfs." And I can't do that with my books. If I could, I probably wouldn't write them.
CHARLES DE LINT
interview, Challenging Destiny, Number 9
A body of work may be reviled -- mostly by those who have no knowledge of its workings -- and yet still carry elements of what can only be considered eternal truths.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Little Country
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.
CHARLES DE LINT
Someplace to Be Flying
The moon likes secrets ... 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.
CHARLES DE LINT
Dreams Underfoot
One expected growth, change; without it, the world was less, the well of inspiration dried up, the muses fled.
CHARLES DE LINT
Memory and Dream
Thing is, while I know better, I like sounding ignorant. Talk like this and people figure you're about as dumb as a fencepost, which suits me fine. Makes it all that much easier to take advantage of 'em.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
Fortune-telling doesn't reveal the future; it mirrors the present. It resonates against what your subconscious already knows and hauls it up out of the darkness so you can get a good look at it.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Paperjack", Dreams Underfoot: The Newford Collection
Tattoos ... are the stories in your heart, written on your skin.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Mystery of Grace
The real trouble comes from not knowing what we really want in the first place.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night", The Ivory and the Horn
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.
CHARLES DE LINT
Moonlight & Vines
Books and music saved me as a teenager because it was through them that I realized that I wasn't alone in my obsessive love for words and music.
CHARLES DE LINT
"One Thing Leads to Another: An Interview with Charles de Lint", The Yalsa Hub, September 19, 2013
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.
CHARLES DE LINT
Dreams Underfoot