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
Charles de Lint
Born place: in Bussum, Netherlands
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“Strength comes in more ways than one. Muscle is the weakest form. Inner strength is the strongest, nobody can break you there. Inner is what she has, and what I should have been striving towards.”
― quote from Becoming Noah Baxter
“In his particular line of business, peace had reigned for nearly a year. And peace was killing him.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“She felt like a baton getting passed along in a relay race, completely devoid of any control over her destiny.”
― Gretchen McNeil, quote from Possess
“human Reason cannot be reduced to the result of evolutionary adaptation; art is not just a heightened procedure of providing sensual pleasures, but a medium of Truth;”
― Slavoj Žižek, quote from The Parallax View
“chest. Everything looked strange and slow. Vernon bent over him. He felt him give his chest a big shove, and he felt his arms being raised. All at once the pressure seemed to break, and he coughed violently. Vernon rolled him to his side. He coughed, coughed again, felt a blinding icy headache take hold. Reality returned with a vengeance. Tom struggled to sit up. Vernon put his arms under his shoulders and supported him. “What happened?” “This foolish brother of yours, this Vernito, jumped into that river and pulled you out from under those logs. I have never seen such craziness in my life.” “He did?” Tom turned and looked at Vernon. He was soaked, and his forehead was cut. Blood and water ran together into his beard. Vernon grasped him, and he stood up. His head cleared a little more, and the pounding headache began to subside. He look down into the roaring chute of water ripping into the frenzied pool jammed full of broken tree trunks and branches. He looked at Vernon again. It finally sank in. “You,” he said incredulously. Vernon shrugged. “You saved my life.” “Well, you saved mine,” he said, almost defensively. “You decapitated a snake for me. All I did was jump.” Don Alfonso said, “By the Virgin Mary, I still cannot”
― Douglas Preston, quote from The Codex
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