Quotes from The Very Best of Charles de Lint

“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

About the author

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“Land and sea.
We may think of them as opposites; as complements. But there is a difference in how we think of them; the sea, and the land.
If we are walking around in a forest, a meadow or a town, we see our surroundings as being made up of individual elements. There are many different kinds of trees in varying sizes, those buildings, these streets. The meadow, the flowers, the bushes. Our gaze lingers on details, and if we are standing in a forest in the autumn, we become tongue-tied if we try to describe the richness around us. All this exists on land.
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If we are taken so far out in a small boat that no land is visible in any direction, we may catch sight of the sea. It is not a pleasant experience. The sea is a god, an unseeing, unhearing deity that does not even know we exist. We mean less than a grain of sand on an elephant's back, and if the sea wants us, it will take us. That's just the way it is. The sea knows no limits, makes no concessions. It has given us everything and it can take everything away from us.
To other gods we send our prayer: Protect us from the sea.”
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“At Balkan, it was more like, ‘I’ll do your mum up the arse.’ They were mental Yugoslavs who smoked like chimneys and flung their boots about, and I thought, Great, just like at home.”
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“The sunlight blinded her. She felt purified by its rays. She had been in the dark for so long, and in so many ways.☥

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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