Quote

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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Charles de Lint
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 22
Musician
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Samuel M. Key
Firsts
Drawing
First
Praise
Refine
Children
Early
Corrected
Much
Effort
Drawings
Way
Ability
Crude
Learn
Attempts
Language
Efforts
Given
Rarely

More quotes by Charles de Lint

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If you don't believe that the world has a heart, then you won't hear it beating, you won't think it's alive and you won't consider what you're doing to it.
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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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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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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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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Every time you do a good deed you shine the light a little farther into the dark. And the thing is, when you're gone that light is going to keep shining on, pushing the shadows back.
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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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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I was a misfit, but I think most teenagers feel that way. I don't care if you were a popular jock or the kid who spent his lunch hours in a stairwell reading a book, we all seem to have dealt with insecurities of one kind or another throughout our high school years.
Charles de Lint
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Tattoos...are the stories in your heart, written on your skin.
Charles de Lint
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The best artists know what to leave out.
Charles de Lint
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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.
Charles de Lint
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I can’t imagine it now, but I must’ve been innocent at some time in my life. A baby don’t just get itself born bad, do it?
Charles de Lint
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Dying doesn't end anything - it just changes where you are
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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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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Not everything has to mean something. Some things just are.
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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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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[She] had felt straight away that she wasn’t meeting a new friend, but recognizing an old one.
Charles de Lint