Charles de Lint Quotes

Don't lie about it. You made a mistake. Admit it and move on. Just don't do it again. Ever

A million years ago, when doing research about the world of municipal government, one thing that struck me is how often people's job titles changed - from one department to another, from the public to the private sector and back again. People move around a lot, everyone has her eye on some other, slightly better situation in some other corner of city hall. Plus governments are constantly shuffling and reorganizing and shuttering or condensing departments - they are often byzantine hodge-podges of fractured org charts lying atop a bed of shifting sand.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join, The innumerable caravan which moves, To that mysterious realm where each shall take, His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, Scourged by his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed, By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch, About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

Tis evident that all reasonings concerning matter of fact are founded on the relation of cause and effect, and that we can never infer the existence of one object from another, unless they be connected together, either mediately or immediately... Here is a billiard ball lying on the table, and another ball moving toward it with rapidity. They strike; and the ball which was formerly at rest now acquires a motion. This is as perfect an instance of the relation of cause and effect as any which we know, either by sensation or reflection.

Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.

We've got to be explicit that the road to greater economic success does not lie in this cosy assumption that you can move from a single market through a single currency to harmonising all your taxes and then having a federal fiscal policy and then effectively having a federal state.

How do you know if a demon is lying? His lips are moving.

Do you know, I always thought unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!" Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you.

What people think about you is not supposed to matter much, so long as you yourself know where the truth lies; but I have found out, as have others who move in and out of newspaper headlines, that on occasion it can matter a good deal. For once you enter the world of headlines you learn there is not one truth but two: the one which you know from the facts; and the one which the public, or at any rate a highly imaginative part of the public, acquires by osmosis.

In our system, grand juries take every charge, every lie, and they try to sort the truth from the lies, and then they move forward into the system. And that's how the system ought to work. We should respect the secrecy of the grand jury so they can sort through what's true and what's not. And someone is leaking, and if they are leaking from the grand jury investigation, then that's a violation of the law.

Time to move on, time to get going. What lies ahead I have no way of knowing. But under my feet, baby, grass is growing.

I shall forget you presently, my dear, So make the most of this, your little day, Your little month, your little half a year, Ere I forget, or die, or move away, And we are done forever; by and by I shall forget you, as I said, but now, If you entreat me with your loveliest lie I will protest you with my favorite vow. I would indeed that love were longer-lived, And vows were not so brittle as they are, But so it is, and nature has contrived To struggle on without a break thus far,-- Whether or not we find what we are seeking Is idle, biologically speaking.

As I see our world, I have never seen greater confusion, greater loss of meaning, greater uncertainty, and greater fear of what looms in front of us. Politics has gotten out of control everywhere. Nobody sees a mascot or a leader, and everyone wants to know what really lies ahead here.

I thought I would love you forever—and, a little, I may, in the way I still move toward a crate, knees bent, or reach for a man: as one might stretch for the three or four fruit that lie in the sun at the top of the tree; too ripe for any moment but this, they open their skin at first touch, yielding sweetness, sweetness and heat, and in me, each time since, the answering yes.

Do I really have moves like Jagger? F**king A, no, I don’t. But I was going to tell everybody that I did and hoped they believed me.

She's not dead. You didn't kill her, nor did the hunger birds, although they did their best to get to you through her. She's been given her ocean. One day, in its own time, the ocean will give her back.I thought of corpses and of skeletons with pearls for eyes. I thought of mermaids with tails that flicked when they moved, like my goldfishes' tails had flicked before my goldfish had stopped moving, to lie, belly up, like Lettie, on the top of the water. I said, 'Will she be the same?

I think, overall, India is today on the move. The economic reforms that our salvation lies in - operating an open society, political system, an open economy, economic system - this has widespread support.

After much consideration, I am moving onward with a combination of disappointment at leaving behind a character I have loved playing for seven years and excitement of the new opportunities in acting and producing that lie ahead.

In the middle of a garden grew a rose tree; it was full of roses, and in the loveliest of them all lived an elf. He was so tiny that no human eye could see him. He had a snug little room behind every petal of the rose. He was as well made and as perfect as any human child, and he had wings reaching from his shoulders to his feet. Oh, what a delicious scent there was in his room, and how lovely and transparent the walls were, for they were palest pink, rose petals.

It would have been nice to have had unicorns.

I look out the window again, taking slow, deep breaths into a body too tense to move. And as I stare out at the land, I think that this, if nothing else, is compelling evidence for my parents’ God, that our world is so massive that it is completely out of our control, that we cannot possibly be as large as we feel. -Tris Prior

On the tawny sands and shelves trip the pert fairies and the dapper elves.

Guard your light and protect it. Move it forward into the world and be fully confident that if we connect light to light to light, and join the lights together of the one billion young people in our world today, we will be enough to set our whole planet aglow.

He knew how to handle pain. You had to lie down with pain, not draw back away from it. You let yourself sort of move around the outside edge of pain like with cold water until you finally got up your nerve to take yourself in hand. Then you took a deep breath and dove in and let yourself sink down it clear to the bottom. And after you had been down inside pain a while you found that like with cold water it was not nearly as cold as you had thought it was when your muscles were cringing themselves away from the outside edge of it as you moved around it trying to get up your nerve. He knew pain.