368 Quotes by Charles de Lint

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.

Everything’s hard, if it means anything.

There’s stories and then there’s stories. The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you’ve heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on, and the giving only makes you feel better. The others are just words on a page.

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.

The thing to remember when you’re writing is, it’s not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It’s whether it wakes a truth in your reader.

I’m not saying that they had to be handicapped to share their gifts with us, but if they hadn’t been handicapped, maybe they would have gone on to be other people and not become the inspirations or creative people they came to be.

As children, we come into the world with a natural desire to both speak and draw. Society makes sure that we learn language properly, right from the beginning, but art is treated as a gift of innate genius, something we either have or don’t.

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.

The thing with pretending you’re in a good mood is that sometimes you can.