Charles de Lint · 425 pages
Rating: (1.3K votes)
“Gina always believed there was magic in the world. "But it doesn't work in the way it does in fairy tales," she told me. "It doesn't save us. We have to save ourselves.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from The Very Best of Charles de Lint
“Sculptors, poets, painters, musicians—they’re the traditional purveyors of Beauty. But it can as easily be created by a gardener, a farmer, a plumber, a careworker. It’s the intent you put into your work, the pride you take in it—whatever it is.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from The Very Best of Charles de Lint
“The more she tried to recapture the impulse that had set her wanting to put pen to paper, the less it seemed to have ever existed in the first place.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from The Very Best of Charles de Lint
“The moon likes secrets,” Meran said. “And secret things. She lets mysteries bleed into her shadows and leaves us to ask whether they originated from otherworlds, or from our own imaginations.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from The Very Best of Charles de Lint
“You could only make art by setting it free. Anything else was just a memory, no matter how you stored it. On film or paper, sculpted or recorded.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from The Very Best of Charles de Lint
“You must always confront your fears,” Goon said as though she hadn’t spoken. “Then skulking monsters become merely unfamiliar shadows, thrown by a tree bough. Whispering voices are just the wind. The wild flare of panic is merely a burst of emotion, not a terror spell cast by some evil witch.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from The Very Best of Charles de Lint
“We got to stop asking for things, stop waiting for people to give us the things we think we need. All we really need is the stories. We have the stories and they’ll give us the one thing nobody else can, the thing we can only take for ourselves, because there’s nobody can give you back your pride. You’ve got to take it back yourself.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from The Very Best of Charles de Lint
“Just stories. You and me, everybody, we’re a set of stories, and what those stories are is what makes us what we are.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from The Very Best of Charles de Lint
“We have not inherited the earth from our fathers, we are borrowing it from our children.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from The Very Best of Charles de Lint
“She’s old, is Granny Weather, he says, and cranky, too, but there’s more magic in one of her toenails than most of us will find in a lifetime.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from The Very Best of Charles de Lint
“The past scampers like an alleycat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter—here ink is smeared on a page, there lies an old photograph with a chewed corner, elsewhere still, a nest has been made of old newspapers, the headlines running one into the other to make strange declarations.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from The Very Best of Charles de Lint
“There was dusting and sweeping to do, books to be put away. Lovely books. It didn't matter to Dick if they were serious leather-bound tomes or paperbacks with garish covers. He loved them all, for they were filled with words, and words were magic to this hob. Wise and clever humans had used some marvelous spell to imbue each book with every kind of story and character you could imagine, and many you couldn't. If you knew the key to unlock the words, you could experience them all - Pixel Pixies”
― Charles de Lint, quote from The Very Best of Charles de Lint
“There’s stories and then there’s stories,” he said, interrupting her. “The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you’ve heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on and the giving only makes you feel better. “The others are just words on a page.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from The Very Best of Charles de Lint
“There’s stories and then there’s stories,” he said, interrupting her. “The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you’ve heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on and the giving only makes you feel better.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from The Very Best of Charles de Lint
“the lies in fiction are such an effective way to tell emotional truths.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from The Very Best of Charles de Lint
“You lose your pride and you lose everything. We don’t want to know the stories, because we don’t want to remember. But we’ve got to take the good with the bad and make ourselves whole again, be proud again. A proud people can never be defeated. They lose battles, but they’ll never lose the war, because for them to lose the war you’ve got to go out and kill each and every one of them, everybody with even a drop of the blood. And even then, the stories will go on.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from The Very Best of Charles de Lint
“We have not inherited the earth from our fathers, we are borrowing it from our children. —Native American saying”
― Charles de Lint, quote from The Very Best of Charles de Lint
“Nothing strikes me as truly weird,” Jilly told him. “There’s only stuff I haven’t figured out yet.”
― Charles de Lint, quote from The Very Best of Charles de Lint
“It wasn’t a romance; they were too young for that. Theo did not know of a single thirteen-year-old boy in his class who admitted to having a girlfriend.”
― John Grisham, quote from Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer
“He opened the door, stepped inside, and got himself properly greeted. As always, Judge was waiting, too. He bounced from his bed and ran to see Theo. “I’m so sorry about April,” Elsa gushed. She sounded as if she knew the girl personally, which she did not. But by now, as with any tragedy, everyone in Strattenburg knew or claimed to know April and could say only great things about her. “Any news?” Theo asked, rubbing Judge’s head. “Nothing. I’ve listened to the radio all day, no word,”
― John Grisham, quote from The Abduction
“I recall thinking that I was stroking toward either the end of all life or the beginning of a new one. Neither possibility stirred me. Every man knows he will die; and nobody believes it. On that paradox stand not only a host of religions but the entity of sane being. I wasn't able to credit my own non-existence any better than the next man; what I had lost was a healthy abhorrence of the state. It had not dropped from me because of any particular shock or misfortune. It had moulted from me year by year, for all of my thirty-five, to leave me naked in apathy.”
― John Myers Myers, quote from Silverlock
“There was no feeling of dedication because it was absolutely involuntary. I do not doubt that if the Marines had asked for volunteers for an impossible campaign such as Guadalcanal, almost everyone now fighting would have stepped forward. But that is sacrifice; that is voluntary. Being expended robs you of the exultation, the self-abnegation, the absolute freedom of self-sacrifice. Being puts one in the role of victim rather than sacrificer, and there is always something begrudging in this. I doubt if Isaac would have accepted the knife of his father, Abraham, entirely without reproach; yet, for the same master, he would have gladly gone to his death a thousand times. The world is full of the sacrifice of heroes and martyrs, but there was only one Victim.”
― Robert Leckie, quote from Helmet for My Pillow
“And yet here I am—torn: wanting
to pull him closer, saving him, and at the same time
wishing I could hop on the back of his motorcycle and,
for once, allow someone to save me.”
― Katie Klein, quote from Cross My Heart
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