Quotes by Charles de Lint

Thats the thing about magic; youve got to know its still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you.

Inside us lies every possibility that is available to a sentient being. Every darkness, every light. It is the choices we make that decide who or what we will be.

I want to be magic. I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile. I want to be a friend of elves and live in a tree. Or under a hill. I want to marry a moonbeam and hear the stars sing. I dont want to pretend at magic anymore. I want to be magic.

When youre touched by magic, nothings ever quite the same again. What really makes me sad is all those people who never have the chance to know that touch. Theyre too busy, or they just dont hold with make-believe, so they shut the door without really knowing it was there to be opened in the first place.

Its all a matter of paying attention, being awake in the present moment, and not expecting a huge payoff. The magic in this world seems to work in whispers and small kindnesses.

Not only do we all have magic, its all around us as well. We just dont pay attention to it. Every time we make something out of nothing, thats an act of magic. It doesnt matter if its a painting or a garden, or an abuelo telling his grandchildren some tall tale. Every time we fix something thats broken, whether its a car engine or a broken heart, thats an act of magic.And what makes it magic is that we *choose* to create or help, just as we can choose to harm. But its so easy to destroy and so much harder to make things better. Thats why doing the right thing makes you stronger.If we can only remember what we are and what we can do, nobody can bind us or control us.

Gina always believed there was magic in the world. But it doesnt work in the way it does in fairy tales, she told me. It doesnt save us. We have to save ourselves.

Magic lies in between things, between the day and the night, between yellow and blue, between any two things.

Lifes an act of magic, too. Claire Hamill sings a line in one of her songs that really sums it up for me: If theres no magic, theres no meaning. Without magic- or call it wonder, mystery, natural wisdom- nothing has any depth. Its all just surface. You know: what you see is what you get. I honestly believe theres more to everything than that, whether its a Monet hanging in a gallery or some old vagrant sleeping in an alley.

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 theres 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 thats impossible to articulate with the vocabulary we have at the moment.This is too weird.Annie shrugged. What can I say? Its 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 theyre 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. Theyre like Jacks stories, true and not true, all at the same time. They dont exactly shape my life, but they certainly colour it. She glanced at him, I wouldnt like to live in a world where everythings as cut-and-dried as most people think it is

Everything has a spirit and its all connected. If you think about that, if you live your life by it, then youre less likely to cause any hurt. Its like how our bodies go back into the ground when we die, so that connects us to the earth. If you dump trash, youre dumping it on your and my ancestors. Or to bring it down to its simplest level: treat everything and everybody the way you want to be treated, because when you hurt someone, youre only hurting yourself.

The faerie represent the beauty we dont see, or even choose to ignore. Thats why Ill paint them in junkyards, or fluttering around a sleeping wino. No place or person is immune to spirit. Look hard enough, and everything has a story. Everybody is important.- Jilly Coppercorn

There were two forests for every one you entered. There was the one you walked in, the physical echo, and then there was the one that was connected to all the other forests, with no consideration of distance, or time. The forest primeval, remembered through the collective memory of every tree in the same way that people remembered myth- through the collective subconscious that Jung mapped, the shared mythic resonance that lay buried in every human mind. Legend and myth, all tangled in an alphabet of trees remembered, not always with understanding, but with wonder. With awe.

All forests are one... They are all echoes of the first forest that gave birth to Mystery when the world began.

What do they say about meeting a bear in the woods? Oh right, you shouldnt. And to make sure you dont, you should make a lot of noise so that theyll will know where you are and keep their distance because, supposedly, theyre as nervous of us as we are of them. Which is all goo, except this bear doesnt seem the least bit nervous. Hes giving me a look like Im Goldilocks, ate his porridge, broke his chair, slept in his bed, and now its payback time.- Widdershins

She wanted to tell him what happened wasnt really his fault, but she knew that wasnt the way this kind of guilt worked. Intellectually, he already knew that. It was his emotions that were tripping him up. The tangle of love and memory and what might have been.

Its my diary, shed explained. Every mark Ive had drawn on my skin connects me to where and who Ive 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.

Everybodys got the potential for great good and great wrong in them, but its thechoices we make that define who we really are.

I suppose the other thing too many forget is that we were all stories once, each and every one of us. And we remain stories. But too often we allow those stories to grow banal, or cruel or unconnected to each other.We allow the stories to continue, but they no longer have a heart. They no longer sustain us.

I watched the people passing below, each of them a story, each story part of somebody elses, all of it connected to the big story of the world. People werent islands, so far as I was concerned. How could they be, when their stories kept getting tangled up in everybody elses?