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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: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 22
Musician
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Samuel M. Key
Away
Circles
Fit
Cutting
Incessantly
Pieces
Editing
Relationship
Suit
Particular
Circle
Friends
Quick
Jobs
Suits

More quotes by 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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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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She hoped he was running to his red deer woman, and that when he tapped on the door of her heart, she'd open it wide and let him in.
Charles de Lint
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The real problem is, people think life is a ladder, and it's really a wheel.
Charles de Lint
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I always feel that there is a curtain, you know, that if I could just peek behind the curtain I'd see how the world really works. And since I haven't had it I have to write about it instead.
Charles de Lint
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Well, you know this world isn't perfect.' 'No, you're wrong. This world IS perfect, people just come along and mess it up sometimes.
Charles de Lint
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The best artists know what to leave out.
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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Wondering’s healthy. Broadens the mind. Opens you up to all sorts of stray thoughts and possibilities.
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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Let it go on record that any confusion arose simply because we lacked certain commonalities of reference.
Charles de Lint
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Not everything has to mean something. Some things just are.
Charles de Lint
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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.
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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Well, while I didn't have the more extreme experiences of some of my characters, I didn't exactly come from the most normal of households. Or rather, it was normal, in that dysfunctional families appear to be the norm.
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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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
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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.
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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It is so easy for your people to forget that everything has a spirit, that all are equal. That magic and mystery are a part of your lives, not something to store away in a child's bedroom, or to use as an escape from your lives.
Charles de Lint