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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.

Charles de Lint

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Charles de Lint
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 22
Musician
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Samuel M. Key
Paper
Whether
True
Truth
Remember
Writing
Thing
Wakes
Reader

More quotes by Charles de Lint

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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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Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. With my writing... sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it highlights something I’m working on, sometimes it simply helps me stay in the narrative mood.
Charles de Lint
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Not everything has to mean something. Some things just are.
Charles de Lint
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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.
Charles de Lint
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It's all a matter of paying attention, being awake in the present moment, and not expecting a huge payoff. The magic in this world seems to work in whispers and small kindnesses.
Charles de Lint
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Why did men worship in churches, locking themselves away in the dark, when the world lay beyond its doors in all its real glory?
Charles de Lint
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The best artists know what to leave out.
Charles de Lint
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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.
Charles de Lint
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The stronger a woman gets, the more insecure the men in her life feel. It doesn’t work that way for a woman. We celebrate strength--in our partners as well as in ourselves.
Charles de Lint
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The puppet thinks: It's not so much what they make me do as their hands inside me.
Charles de Lint
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Life is like art. You have to work hard to keep it simple and still have meaning.
Charles de Lint
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Our lives are stories, and the stories we have to give to each other are the most important. No one has a story too small and all are of equal stature. We each tell them in different ways, through different mediums—and if we care about each other, we'll take the time to listen.
Charles de Lint
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Children are the brightest treasures we bring forth into this world, but too large a percentage of the population continues to treat them as inconveniences and nuisances, when they're not treating them as possessions or toys.
Charles de Lint
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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.
Charles de Lint
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But that's what we all are-just stories. We only exist by how people remember us, by the stories we make of our lives. Without the stories, we'd just fade away.
Charles de Lint
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The road leading to a goal does not separate you from the destination it is essentially a part of it.
Charles de Lint
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I find the characters in my head and the more I write about them, the better I get to know them.
Charles de Lint
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Writing music uses a whole different process that involves a lot of noodling and just seeing what comes.
Charles de Lint
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When you're touched by magic, nothing's ever quite the same again. What really makes me sad is all those people who never have the chance to know that touch. They're too busy, or they just don't hold with make-believe, so they shut the door without really knowing it was there to be opened in the first place.
Charles de Lint
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Most times we only see things for the way we are. But we're good at lying to ourselves. Sometimes we need somebody who's not living in our skin to point out how things really are.
Charles de Lint