Quotes from Charles de Lint

If you're not ready to die, then how can you live?

I've always known and been interested in people who are a little bit off the norm. I like to call attention to the idea that they are there, that they are real people, not invisible.

Remember the quiet wonders. The world has more need of them than it has for warriors.

The few wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them.

The beginning of a friendship, the fact that two people out of the thousands around them can meet and connect and become friends, seems like a kind of magic to me. But maintaining a friendship requires work. I don't mean that as a bad thing. Good art requires work as well.

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.

I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile.

I'm not Chinese. I thrive in interesting times.

In the dark attics of our minds, all times mingle.

Every time we fix something that broken, whether it's a car engine or a broken heart, that an act of magic. And what makes it magic is that we choose to create or help, just as we can choose to harm.

It's all those stories and how they braid together that tells us who and what and where we are

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.

It's good to have mysteries. It reminds us that there's more to the world than just making do and having a bit of fun.

What I want to do is travel deep and deeper into the dreamlands, to find that place that I know is waiting for me here. My home.

When all's said and done, all roads lead to the same end. So it's not so much which road you take, as how you take it.

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.

I've always believed the lies we use to make our fictions reveal the truth with far more honesty than any history or herstory or life story.

There's bad apples in whatever way you want to group people - doesn't matter if it's religious, political or social. The big mistake is generalizing.

The trouble with advice is that it's usually something you don't want to hear.

The real trouble comes from not knowing what we really want in the first place.

Not everything has to mean something. Some things just are.

Only fools think they're wise; the rest of us just muddle through as we can.

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

Why did men worship in churches, locking themselves away in the dark, when the world lay beyond its doors in all its real glory?