“Let me give you some advice: Try to approach things without preconceived ideas, without supposing you already know everything there is to know about them. Get that trick down and you'll be surprised at what's really all around you.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from Someplace to Be Flying
“But what the evil people do, that's their responsibility. The burden they have to carry. Sure, when we see 'em starting on causing some hurt, we've got to try and stop 'em, but mostly what the rest of us should be concerning ourselves with is doing right by others. Every time you do a good turn, you shine the light a little further into the dark. And the thing is, even when we're gone, that light's going to keep shining on, pushing the shadows back.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from Someplace to Be Flying
“There was too much going on here -- too much that strayed from odd all the way over into seriously weird.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from Someplace to Be Flying
“The best change you can make is to hold up a mirror so that people can look into it and change themselves. That's the only way a person can be changed."
By looking into yourself," Zia said. "Even if you have to look into a mirror that's outside yourself to do it."
"And you know," Maida added. "That mirror can be a story you hear, or just someone else's eyes. Anything that reflects back so you can see yourself in it.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from Someplace to Be Flying
“It's my diary", she'd explained. "Every mark I've had drawn on my skin connects me to where and who I've been- so I never forget who I am and how I got here."There was humour in the smile she offered him. "And you know what the real beauty of it is?"
Hank had shaken his head.
"Nobody can take it away.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from Someplace to Be Flying
“You've got to spread out as far as you can, cut down a whole forest, irrigate a whole desert, just to make sure that you won't accidentally stumble upon a place that's still in its natural state.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from Someplace to Be Flying
“Sometimes we wonder what it's like to feel normal," Maida said. "You know, like all the people you see out on the streets or sitting in their little boxy homes."
...
"But then", Maida went on, "we see how boring they are and we're happy to be the way we are.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from Someplace to Be Flying
“There's no such thing as fiction", Annie told him once. "If you can imagine something, then it's happened.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from Someplace to Be Flying
“I do know that the gardens of the first lands are still lying there, right under the skin of the world- pulsing the way our heartbeat drums under our own skin. And I believe that there's a connectedness between everything that gives some people a deep and abiding affinity to a certain kind of place or creature."
"Like totems?"
"Maybe. Or maybe something even more personal- something that's impossible to articulate with the vocabulary we have at the moment."
"This is too weird."
Annie shrugged. "What can I say? It's getting late, the stars are out. Once the sun sets, I tend to embrace whatever wild spirits are running around in the darkness, talking away to each other. I leave the logic of streets and pavement and cars and tall buildings behind and buy into the old magics that they're whispering about. Sometimes those little mysteries and bits of wisdom stick to the bones of my head and I carry them right out into the sunlight again. They're like Jack's stories, true and not true, all at the same time. They don't exactly shape my life, but they certainly colour it." She glanced at him, "I wouldn't like to live in a world where everything's as cut-and-dried as most people think it is”
― Charles de Lint, quote from Someplace to Be Flying
“The lonesome dark.
That's what Jack called a night like this. When you were distanced from everything and everybody. Out on your own and there was nobody to care if you were happy or sad. If you lived or died.
The lonesome dark hadn't existed in the old days. That was something people invented. Like time. Parcel up the days, parcel up the seasons. Add a minute here, a day there when it doesn't quite fit. Trim the square peg so that you could slide it into the round hole. In the old days the night was as open as the day. It wasn't a better place to hide because there was nothing to hide from. You weren't outside because there was no in.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from Someplace to Be Flying
“living in an environment I can't control doesn't scare me. I'm partial to the surprises.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from Someplace to Be Flying
“Everybody's got a true home—maybe not where they're living, but
where their heart lives.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from Someplace to Be Flying
“What if time's not linear, the way people think it is? What if the past, present and future are all going on at the same time, only they're separated by- oh, I don't know- a kind of gauze or something. And maybe there are people that can see through that gauze.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from Someplace to Be Flying
“But the evil people do, that's their responsibility. The burden they have to carry. Sure, when we see 'em starting on causing some hurt, we've got to try and stop 'em, but mostly what the rest of us should be concerning ourselves with is doing right by others. Every time you do a good turn, you shine the light a little farther into the dark. And the thing is, even when we're gone, that light's going to keep shining on, pushing the shadows back.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from Someplace to Be Flying
“I don't know," Kerry said. "It doesn't feel like any medicine I ever took before." She raised a hand to her forehead. "It really does feel like a light, shining inside me. How did you put it there?" Maida laughed. "You're so funny! I didn't put it there. Nobody can do that—not even Raven." "But—" "It was always there. I just made it a little brighter so that you could find it.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from Someplace to Be Flying
Charles de Lint
Born place: in Bussum, Netherlands
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“Murphy’s Law doesn’t mean bad stuff will happen,” he explained gently, really wanting her to understand. “It means ‘whatever can happen… will happen.’ And that sounded just fine to us.”
― Greg Keyes, quote from Interstellar
“Heinrich Himmler declared: ‘Whether 10,000 Russian women collapse with exhaustion in the construction of an anti-tank ditch for Germany only interests me insofar as the ditch gets dug for Germany.”
― Richard J. Evans, quote from The Third Reich at War
“Internet, jogos de video, computadores, são úteis, mas tâm destruído algo inviolável: a infância. Onde está o prazer do silência? Onde está a arte da observação? Onde está a inocência? Angustia-me que o sistema esteja a gerar crianças insatisfeitas e ansiosas. Fortes candidatas a serem doentes psiquiátricos e não seres humanos felizes e livres.”
― Augusto Cury, quote from The Dreamseller: The Calling
“I guess it comes down to greed. You don’t pay folks, you make more money. That and thinking one race wasn’t as good as another.”
― David Baldacci, quote from First Family
“Why, Uruvi always wondered, would Queen Madri consign herself to the flames, when no queen before her had joined their husband in the funeral pyre? Moreover, why would the mother of tiny, helpless six-month-old twins, Nakul and Sahadeva, kill herself and leave them orphaned and under the care of her husband’s first wife? It was strange. Had Madri, too, been mortally wounded like her husband, King Pandu, when they had been attacked? Had she been able to talk to Kunti before she died? Had Shakuni played up the curse of the sage to his advantage after all? If he could instigate Duryodhana to burn the Pandavas and the Queen Mother in the lac palace, he would not have any qualms in murdering King Pandu too. The only person who probably knew the truth was Kunti—but she was an evasive lady who knew how to keep her secrets. Uruvi recalled how she had pestered her on her wedding day about whether she had any regrets, but had got nothing out of her.”
― Kavita Kané, quote from Karna's Wife: The Outcast's Queen
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