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I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile.
Charles de Lint
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I've always believed the lies we use to make our fictions reveal the truth with far more honesty than any history or herstory or life story.
Charles de Lint
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The thing is … nothing’s as easy as we'd like it to be. … And the real trouble comes from not knowing what we really want in the first place.
Charles de Lint
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Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?
Charles de Lint
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Stone walls confine a tinker; cold iron binds a witch; but a musician's music can never be fettered, for it lives first in her heart and mind.
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'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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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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By enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged.
Charles de Lint
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I've always known and been interested in people who are a little bit off the norm. I like to call attention to the idea that they are there, that they are real people, not invisible.
Charles de Lint
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The problem with children is that you have to put up with their parents.
Charles de Lint
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Everybody makes the same mistake. Fortune-telling doesn't reveal the future; it mirrors the present. It resonates against what your subconscious already knows and hauls it up out of the darkness so you can get a good look at it.
Charles de Lint
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A body of work may be reviled - mostly by those who have no knowledge of its workings - and yet still carry elements of what can only be considered eternal truths.
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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They stood and listened, arms around each other for comfort, as the sound washed over them. It reverberated in the marrow of their bones, sung high and sweet, heartbreakingly mournful, quick as a jig, slow as the saddest air. Their hearts swelled with its beauty, its mystery. With all it revealed, and all that it hid.
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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If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are just as they 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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I'm not Chinese. I thrive in interesting times.
Charles de Lint
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Don't forget - no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.
Charles de Lint
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There are few joys to compare with the telling of a well-told tale.
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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There are people who take the heart out of you, and there are people who put it back.
Charles de Lint
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The Lost Music was his way of talking about the way he believed that old wives' tales and dance tunes and folktales were just the tangled echoes of something that's not quite of this world … something we all knew once, but have forgotten since.
Charles de Lint
