Charles de Lint Quotes

The Jungian view of drama would be that it affects all of our imaginations and somehow taps into our hidden, ancient, primordial memories.

Science and Technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconscious with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives.

It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology.

I think that objects have memories. I’m always thinking that I’ll go to the museum and see something and have a big memory about some other lifetime.

I believe... that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

The horse is an archetypal symbol which will always find ways to stir up deep and moving ancestral memories in every human being.

Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. ... Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.

A people without the memories of heroic suffering and sacrifices are a people without a history.

It is our duty to keep the memory of our heroes green. Yet they belong to the whole country; they belong to America.

I believe in racial memory too. I'm sure I've got ancient African blood in me that has something to do with what I am.

Scots have long memories, and they're not the most forgiving of people.

Exhibitions of minority art are often intended to make the minority itself more aware of its collective experience. Reinforcing the common memory of miseries and triumphs will, it is expected, strengthen the unity of the group and its determination to achieve a better future. But emphasizing shared experience as opposed to the artist's consciousness of self (which includes his personal and unshared experience of masterpieces) brings to the fore the tension in the individual artist between being an artist and being a minority artist.

(I am) dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times.

No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors ... This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory.

Sometimes memory tricks you. Sometimes beauty is best when it's distant.

Myth is the system of basic metaphors, images, and stories that informs the perceptions, memories, and aspirations of a people; provides the rationale for its institutions, rituals and power structure; and gives a map of the purpose and stages of life.

Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire.

History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.

Outsiders think of Silicon Valley as a success story, but in truth, it is a graveyard. Failure.. is Silicon Valley's greatest strength. Every failed product or enterprise is a lesson stored in the collective memory of the country. We not only don't stigmatize failure, sometime we even admire it. Venture Capitalists actually like to see a little failure in the resumes of entrepreneurs.

There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.

Through dreams a door is opened to mythology, since myths are of the nature of dreams, and that, as dreams arise from an inward world unknown to waking consciousness, so do myths: so, indeed, does life.

Memories aren't stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people.

The morphic fields include all kinds of organizing fields...: The organizing fields of animal and human behaviour, of social and cultural systems, and of mental activity can all be regarded as morphic fields which contain an inherent memory.

[M]yths are not invented as stories are. Myths are inspired-they really are. They come from the same realm that dream comes from.