Quotes from Charles de Lint

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.

We call them faerie. We don't believe in them. Our loss.

I want to be magic. I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile. I want to be a friend of elves and live in a tree. Or under a hill. I want to marry a moonbeam and hear the stars sing. I don't want to pretend at magic anymore. I want to be magic.

Every time you do a good deed you shine the light a little farther into the dark. And the thing is, when you're gone that light is going to keep shining on, pushing the shadows back.

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

Life is like art. You have to work hard to keep it simple and still have meaning.

Stone walls confine a tinker cold iron binds a witch but a musician's music can never be fettered, for it lives first in her heart and mind.

We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It's a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it's true, but then so's everything.

Don't forget - no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.

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.

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

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.

Often the magical elements in my books are standing in for elements of the real world, the small and magical-in-their-own-right sorts of things that we take for granted and no longer pay attention to, like the bonds of friendship that entwine our own lives with those of other people and places.

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.

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.

Gina always believed there was magic in the world. "But it doesn't work in the way it does in fairy tales," she told me. "It doesn't save us. We have to save ourselves.

I've always been interested in the outsider.

You don't have to be Michelangelo to teach basic art, just as you don't have to be Shakespeare to be able to teach the correct use of language.

It reminded me of that tongue-in-cheek quick history of art I'd overheard...Used to be people couldn't draw very well, then they could, and now they can't again.

The best artists know what to leave out.

Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?

Life is like art. You have to work hard to keep it simple and still have meaning.

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.