Charles de Lint Quotes

People have more dimensions to them than we give them credit for. The person you meet on the street that you think is someone, and it's someone else. I'm mistaken for someone else all the time.

Everyone has different layers to who they are.

Nobody's all good or bad, and nobody's all light or dark. Every human being has so many different aspects and facets to them. And there can be something noble and something really dark and dangerous going on in a person all at the same time.

People are so complex and multidimensional that raising someone to 'hero' status is too great a simplification.

Everybody's a complex person. Everybody. Everybody's nuanced.

There is no one label that could be attached to me that would be thought adequate.

'Divergent' is a story about people who don't fit into a category - that is a big part of the message - but it's also about conformity and forcing people into these simple archetypes. At the end of the day, humans don't exist like that. We're multifaceted.

I'm not one aspect of the human experience - none of us is.

Even looking at my last film, 'Notorious,' you got a perception about B.I.G. and who he was, but there was a different side to him.

Humans are the most complicated, nuanced things that exist. We can't be reduced to labels or summed up with five traits - even if they are the Big Five.

Real people - everyone is not just one thing.

By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration but our reconsideration.

There's such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting.

I want my name to mean me.

I'm not going to try and change how people perceive me. I think it's important to be a contradiction. People are contradictions; everyone has contradictions. So I don't expect anyone to look at me differently.

I couldn't bear to have people mispronounce my name. But the person I was was this person who was called Chloe.

I was suddenly struck by how dissimilar we were. It occurred to me that if Grace and I were objects, she would be an elaborate digital clock, synced up with the World Clock in London with technical perfection, and I’d be a snow globe – shaken memories in a glass ball.

Names are still magic; even Sharon, Karen, Darren, and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I can call your name, and when I call your name, you'll come to me.

You're a poem?' I repeated. She chewed her lower lip. 'If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose whose world was swallowed by the sea.' 'Isn't it hard to be three things at the same time?' 'What's your name?' 'Enn.' 'So you are Enn,' she said. 'And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time?

I understand that we are actually complicated people but we are also dreadfully simple.

By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords." (p. 28)

A man's name is not like a mantle which merely hangs about him...but a perfectly fitting garment, which, like the skin, has grown over him, at which one cannot rake and scrape without injuring the man himself.

One realizes after a long time that, actually, we are contradictory, all of us.

To me there is a name for each person. I think it’s marvelous to have a name. A woman is not a woman. It’s either Gena or my mother or some other person.

I'm determined not to lose my name. It's who I am. It has neither aided my progress nor hampered it. It's just who I am. My character. My make-up. My culture and heritage is a very rich one. So what if it's difficult for people to pronounce? We all learned how to say Schwarzenegger.