Charles de Lint Quotes

Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge.

You know the day destroys the night, Night divides the day, Tried to run, Tried to hide, Break on through to the other side...

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.

It's always night, or we wouldn't need light.

I think the fact that I look totally artificial, but I am totally real, has its own kind of magic in it.

But there's a world beyond what we can see and touch, and that world lives by its own laws. What may be impossible in this very ordinary world is very possible there, and sometimes the boundaries between the two worlds disappear, and then who can say what is possible and impossible?

Perhaps [transgression] is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity.

Africa has a genious for extremes, for the beginning and the end. It seems simultaneously connected to some memory of Eden and to some foretaste of apocalypse. Nowhere is day more vivid or night darker. Nowhere are forests more luxuriant. Nowhere is there a continent more miserable

The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist.

Gates appeal to me because of the negative space they allow. They can be closed but at the same time they allow the seasons and breezes to enter and flow. They can shut you out or shut you in. And in some ways there is no difference.

In daylight I belong to the world . . . in the night to sleep and eternity. But in the dusk I'm free from both and belong only to myself . . . and you

Could you understand the meaning of light if there were no darkness to point the contrast? Day and night, life and death, love and hatred, since none of these things can have any being at all apart from the existence of the other, you can no more separate them than you can separate the two sides of a coin.

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / One on another, as Logos depends / On Eros, day on night, the imagined On the real. / This is the origin of change.

The brilliance of morning is in sharp contrast with the darkness of night" - Woman thou art loosed

He will kill mice and he will be kind to babies...but when the moon gets up and the night comes, he is the Cat that Walks by Himself.

That somehow dreams are a blurred line between here and there, like a meeting room in a prison. You’re both in the same room, yet on different sides and really, in different worlds.

I know what it's like to be day and night now; always together, forever apart.

Where the sky begins, the horizon ends, despite the best intentions.

All is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence.

Hmmmm Light makes shadow. Truth makes lies. Hmmmm.

Angels and crows passed each other, one leaving, the other coming.

The strong man holds in a living blend strongly marked opposites. The idealists are not usually realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic. The militant are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant. Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self-assertive humble. But life at it's best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony.

What is a good man but a bad man's teacher? What is a bad man but a good man's job? If you do not remember this, You will get lost, No matter how intelligent you are. It is the great secret.

Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.

To love light, you have to love dark. I'm not trying to be profound, I know you'll understand. I don't mean that you have to hate to love, or that you have to die to live. I mean that sometimes, you turn out the lights just to turn them back on.