Charles de Lint Quotes

I think that inside every adult is the heart of a child. We just gradually convince ourselves that we have to act more like adults.

I was just, as a child, very different from the others, and didn't really care what they thought because you know, a child doesn't really have inhibitions; you sort of gain your inhibitions later.

I used to be a dusty little child.

When you look at children, they're so beautiful, and they seem so peaceful because their faces aren't all wrinkly and worried. They're like beautiful little pieces of pottery or something. You want to think they have this peace because they have no big responsibilities, but it's just not true.

We were innocent once. How could it have gone so bad?

I have a lot of things [in me] that are childlike and innocent and sweet.

What can innocence hope for, When such as sit her judges are corrupted!

The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.

The child is father of the man: And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.

What do you call a bad man? The sort of man who admires innocence.

If there's anything to learn from the history of movies, it's that corruption leads to further corruption, not to innocence.

Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.

My chest got this weird feeling, like when you stare into the eyes of a little baby and the baby looks back up at you and you can feel how pure and innocent it is, so much that it makes your stomach feel empty - probably 'cause you realize you used to be pure like that, too, and now you're not.

All innocent mechanisms are muddied up with experience. Children become less and less translucent. Layers of guile and suspicion grow. It's the law of paternal disenchantments.

He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood.

I worry about kids today - because of the sexual revolution, they're going to grow up and never know what "dirty" means.

Childhood candor... shall I ever find you again?

What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature… That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in.

For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, "This is what I have made of it! This!" And what had she made of it? What, indeed?

For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.

If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it. I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle.

Children are born innocent. Before they are domesticated they live in the moment, love without fear, and don't even think about the opinions of others.