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We're so quick to cut away pieces of ourselves to suit a particular relationship, a job, a circle of friends, incessantly editing who we are until we fit in.

Charles de Lint

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Charles de Lint
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 22
Musician
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Samuel M. Key
Particular
Circle
Friends
Quick
Jobs
Suits
Away
Circles
Fit
Cutting
Incessantly
Pieces
Editing
Relationship
Suit

More quotes by Charles de Lint

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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.
Charles de Lint
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It is important to know what a person was. But it's more important to know what they are now.
Charles de Lint
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As the new work fills my notebooks, I've come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed.
Charles de Lint
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I hate the thought of her being forced into a box that doesn't fit her. Of having her wings cut off, her sight blinded, her hearing muted, her voice stilled.
Charles de Lint
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Can you remember how you felt when you were communicating through your artwork? Not just the sense of completion, but the sense of rightness- the sense that you had brought to life something that could live beyond your sphere of being, that held in it far more potential than you ever realized you were imbuing in the work?
Charles de Lint
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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.
Charles de Lint
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The magic in this world seems to work in whispers and small kindnesses.
Charles de Lint
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Inside us lies every possibility that is available to a sentient being. Every darkness, every light. It is the choices we make that decide who or what we will be.
Charles de Lint
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I don't actually talk about my books much, because I find if I talk about them I don't want to write them anymore. I write to find out what happens. You know how you read a book? That's what I'm doing except I'm just doing it a lot slower because it takes a lot longer to do.
Charles de Lint
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Most children are given far too much praise for their early drawings, so much so that they rarely learn the ability to refine their first crude efforts the way their early attempts at language are corrected.
Charles de Lint
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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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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.
Charles de Lint
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Witchery is merely a word for what we are all capable of - heightened nightsight, an empathy shared with the beasts, a utilization of the more obscure abilities of our minds. Nothing that science can't explain away. Wizardry is spells and enchantments. Fairy tales.
Charles de Lint
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I'm really bad at describing my books. Journalists like to have things like It's The Terminator Meets the Seven Dwarfs. And I can't do that with my books. If I could, I probably wouldn't write them.
Charles de Lint
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I suppose the other thing too many forget is that we were all stories once, each and every one of us. And we remain stories. But too often we allow those stories to grow banal, or cruel or unconnected to each other.We allow the stories to continue, but they no longer have a heart. They no longer sustain us.
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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... he had understood, better than anyone ... the beauty that grew out of the simple knowledge that everything, no matter how small or large it might be, was a perfect example of what it was.
Charles de Lint
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Like legend and myth, magic fades when it is unused.
Charles de Lint
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When one of my characters becomes aware of a magical element, it might be because the world is wider than we assume it to be, but it might also be a reminder to pay attention to what is here already, hidden only because it's been forgotten.
Charles de Lint
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We end up stumbling our way through the forest, never seeing all the unexpected and wonderful possibilities and potentials because we're looking for the idea of a tree, instead of appreciating the actual trees in front of us.
Charles de Lint