Charles de Lint

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

"The problem with children is that you have to put up with their parents."

"It’s not that I don’t have convictions, or that I won’t defend them. I save my battles for things that have meaning instead of tilting at every mild irritation that comes my way. You can fritter away your whole life with those kinds of windmills."

"Jilly always says 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."

"Humanity’s whole unfortunate history is one long account of how we attack what we don’t understand, what’s strange to us."

"See, when you get down to the basics of it, everything’s just molecules vibrating. Which is what music is, what sound is—vibrations in the air. So we’re all part of that music and the worthier it is, the more voices we can add to it, the better off we all are."

"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."

"“He can be so sweet on one page, and then on the next he’s taking you on a tour through an abattoir.” “Just like life,” Bramley said."

"Blasting out of the stores speakers was the new Beastie Boys album. It sounded like a cross between heavy metal and bad rap and was about as appealing as being hit by a car. You couldn’t deny its energy, though."

"“Don’t you ever watch TV?” Jilly shook her head. “What? And let the aliens monitor my brain waves?”"

"The best kinds of practical jokes are those that backfire on whoever’s playing the trick."

"The road leading to a goal does not separate you from the destination; it is essentially a part of it."

"“I’d rather stare at a brick wall, any time, than watch that damn TV in the lounge,” he’d told Jilly more than once. “That’s when things started to go wrong—with the invention of television. Wasn’t till then that we found out there was so much wrong in the world.”"

"Jilly was one of those who preferred to know what was going on and try to do something about it, rather than pretend it wasn’t happening and hoping that, by ignoring what was wrong, it would just go away. Truth was, Jilly had long ago learned, trouble never went away. It just got worse—unless you fixed it."

"But music has its own enchantment and the first few notes of an old tune are all that it requires to transform any site into a place of magic, even if that location is no more than a windowless office cubicle in the old Firehall’s basement."

"In one form or another, it was one of the first implements created by ancient people to give voice to the mysteries that words cannot encompass, but that they had a need to express; only the drum was older."

"That's the thing with magic. You've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you."

"“There’s stories and then there’s stories,” he said, interrupting her. “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.”"

"“Who is he?” she asked. “Or maybe I should be asking what is he?” “I’ve always thought of him as a kind of anima, Jilly said. “A loose bit of myth that got left behind when all the others went on to wherever it is that myths go when we don’t believe in them anymore.”"

"It’s so much easier for most people to relate to a TV set than it is to another person. They get all this data fed into them, but they don’t know what to do with it anymore. When they talk to other people, it’s all surface. How ya doing, what about the weather. The only opinions they have are those that they’ve gotten from people on the TV. They think they’re informed, but all they’re doing is repeating the views of talk show hosts and news commentators."

"They’d met three years ago at a record launch party when Hilary had made a pass at her. Once they got past the fact that Zoe preferred men and wasn’t planning on changing that preference, they discovered that they had far too much in common not to be good friends."

"Creeps don’t need reasons for what they do; that’s why they’re creeps."

"Do you know what fear stands for? Fuck Everything And Run."

"She’s always so ready to believe anything that anyone tells her, so long as it’s magical. Well, I believe in magic, too, but it’s the magic that can turn a caterpillar into a butterfly, the natural wonder and beauty of the world that’s all around me. I can’t believe in some dreamland being real."

"I find that a lot of people have this thing about making crap romantic, the way they like to blur outlaws and heroes, the good with the bad."

"I know that feeling all too well, but I broke the only pair of rose-colored glasses I had the chance to own a long time ago."

"Every big city like this is really two worlds. You could say it’s divided up between the haves and the have-nots, but it’s not that simple. It’s more like some people are citizens of the day and others of the night. Someone like me belongs to the night. Not because I’m bad, but because I’m invisible. People don’t know I exist."

"It was the old story, he realized. Everything, everybody wanted to lay claim to a piece of your soul. And if they couldn’t have it, they made you pay for it in guilt."

"Look, I’m sorry if I don’t measure up to how people want me to be, but this is just the way I am."

"Those who live forever, who have no stake in the dance of death’s inevitable approach, can never understand the sanctity of life."

"Time does more than erode a riverbank or wear mountains down into tired hills. It takes the edge from our memories as well, overlaying everything with a soft focus so that it all blurs together. What really happened gets all jumbled up with the hopes and dreams we once had and what we wish had really happened."

"Everybody makes the same mistake. 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 that you can get a good look at it."

"It’s the questions we ask, the journey we take to get to where we are going that’s more important than the actual answer. 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."

"She calls herself Tallulah, but I know who she really is. A name can’t begin to encompass the sum of all her parts. But that’s the magic of names, isn’t it? That the complex, contradictory individuals we are can be called up complete and whole in another mind through the simple sorcery of a name."

"As far as I’m concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary."

"There are three kinds of kids: the ones that are the odd birds, the ones that pissed on them, and the ones that watched it happen."

"“Often,” he says, “what we take from the spirit world is only a reflection of what lies inside ourselves.”"

"The real problem is, people think life is a ladder, and it’s really a wheel."

"Wisdom never comes to those who believe they have nothing left to learn."

"What I’ve got to talk about, I don’t think a priest wants to hear. What does a priest know or care about secular concerns? All they want to talk about is God. All they want to hear is a tidy list of sins so that they can prescribe their penances and get on to the next customer."

"There are people who take the heart out of you, and there are people who put it back."

"I had the same questions for Superman as I did for God: If he was so powerful, why didn’t he deal with some real problems? Why didn’t he stop wars, feed the starving in Ethiopia, cure cancer? At least God had the Church to do His PR work for Him — if you can buy their reasoning, they have any number of explanations ranging from how the troubles of this life build character to that inarguable catchall, “God’s will.” And the crap in this life sure makes heaven look good. When I was growing up, the writers and artists of Superman never even tried to deal with the problem. And since they didn’t, I could only see Superman as a monster, not a hero. I couldn’t believe his battles with criminals, superpowered geniuses and the like. I never believed in God either."

"Our time’s the most precious thing we’ve got to offer folks, and the worst thing a body can do is to take it away from us."

"That dichotomy between who she was and who she thought she should be was what really killed her."

"When you’re invisible, no one can see that you’re different."

"You can talk all you want about consensual reality, Jilly, but that doesn’t change the fact that some things are real and some things aren’t. There’s a line drawn between the two that separates reality from fantasy."

"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."

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

"“You’re confusing me.” “But not deliberately so,” Coyote says. “Let it go on record that any confusion arose simply because we lacked certain commonalities of reference.”"

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