Quote

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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Charles de Lint
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 22
Musician
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Samuel M. Key
Feel
Havens
Feels
Haven
Writing
Works
Really
Behinds
Always
Behind
World
Instead
Peek
Since
Curtain
Write
Curtains

More quotes by Charles de Lint

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I'm not...' Angharad began, but then she thought. Not what? Not a bad person? Perhaps. But had she never known anger? Never held unkind thoughts? The stranger's observation was valid. No one was innocent of darkness.
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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Let it go on record that any confusion arose simply because we lacked certain commonalities of reference.
Charles de Lint
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Don't start brooding about that, too, she says. Everybody's got a piece of stranger inside them. It's what lets us surprise ourselves and keeps things interesting. -Lupita
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 real problem is, people think life is a ladder, and it's really a wheel.
Charles de Lint
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There's never an easy route to the things that matter.
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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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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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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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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Magic lies in between things, between the day and the night, between yellow and blue, between any two things.
Charles de Lint
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I don't think the world works on merit.
Charles de Lint
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I'm not Chinese. I thrive in interesting times.
Charles de Lint
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How hard would it be to ask children what they see in their heads? How big should the house be in comparison to the family standing in front of it? What is it about the anatomy of the people that doesn't look right? Then let them try it again. Teach them to learn how to see and ask questions.
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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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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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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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
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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