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fb3e493
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There were two forests for every one you entered. There was the one you walked in, the physical echo, and then there was the one that was connected to all the other forests, with no consideration of distance, or time. The forest primeval, remembered through the collective memory of every tree in the same way that people remembered myth- through the collective subconscious that Jung mapped, the shared mythic resonance that lay buried in eve..
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myth
spirit
mythic
forest
trees
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Charles de Lint |
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7b8693d
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The lonesome dark. That's what Jack called a night like this. When you were distanced from everything and everybody. Out on your own and there was nobody to care if you were happy or sad. If you lived or died. The lonesome dark hadn't existed in the old days. That was something people invented. Like time. Parcel up the days, parcel up the seasons. Add a minute here, a day there when it doesn't quite fit. Trim the square peg so that you coul..
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time
round-hole
square-peg
outside
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Charles de Lint |
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36eea47
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living in an environment I can't control doesn't scare me. I'm partial to the surprises.
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Charles de Lint |
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c55bb84
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She shrugged. Everybody makes the same mistake. Fortune-telling doesn't reveal the future; it mirrors the present. It resonates against what your subconscious already knows and hauls it up out of the darkness so that you can get a good look at it.
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Charles de Lint |
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8a5ab4f
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They have alls these laws and social boundaries to keep the worst of them in check. The problem is, villains and bullies just ignore that kind of thing.
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Charles de Lint |
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0ad8920
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Though the three of them were unrelated by blood, they were sisters all the same. In the heart, where it mattered.
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Charles de Lint |
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9aa7b8b
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Everybody's got a true home--maybe not where they're living, but where their heart lives.
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live
home
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Charles de Lint |
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66390d7
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There's no such thing as fiction", Annie told him once. "If you can imagine something, then it's happened."
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Charles de Lint |
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35e0953
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What if time's not linear, the way people think it is? What if the past, present and future are all going on at the same time, only they're separated by- oh, I don't know- a kind of gauze or something. And maybe there are people that can see through that gauze.
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Charles de Lint |
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d44e62a
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I do know that the gardens of the first lands are still lying there, right under the skin of the world- pulsing the way our heartbeat drums under our own skin. And I believe that there's a connectedness between everything that gives some people a deep and abiding affinity to a certain kind of place or creature." "Like totems?" "Maybe. Or maybe something even more personal- something that's impossible to articulate with the vocabulary we hav..
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magic
wisdom
wild-spirits
mysteries
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Charles de Lint |
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04ca1bb
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The trouble with magic is that there's too much it just can't fix. When things go wrong, glimpsing junkyard faerie and crows that can turn into girls and back again doesn't help much. The useful magic's never at hand. The three wishes and the genies in bottles, seven-league boots, invisible cloaks and all. They stay in stories, while out here in the wide world we have to muddle through as best we can on our own.
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Charles de Lint |
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60cb359
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The moon likes secrets," Meran said. "And secret things. She lets mysteries bleed into her shadows and leaves us to ask whether they originated from otherworlds, or from our own imaginations."
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Charles de Lint |
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af09e8c
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I knew it wasn't simply escape that lay on the far side of the borders of fairyland. Instinctively I knew crossing over would mean more than fleeing the constant terror and shame that was mine at that time in my life. There was a knowledge that ran deeper--an understanding hidden in the marrow of my bones that only I can access--telling me that by crossing over, I'd be coming home.
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Charles de Lint |
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d0af561
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Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have known all along that it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek. --Tom Robbins, from Jitterbug Perfume
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Charles de Lint |
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2258df4
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You must always confront your fears," Goon said as though she hadn't spoken. "Then skulking monsters become merely unfamiliar shadows, thrown by a tree bough. Whispering voices are just the wind. The wild flare of panic is merely a burst of emotion, not a terror spell cast by some evil witch."
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Charles de Lint |
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076752b
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But that's what we all are - just stories. We only exist by how people remember us, by the stories we make of our lives. Without the stories, we'd just fade away.
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Charles de Lint |
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94c69e1
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But this was what happened when you mined the past. You gave up control of the present.
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Charles de Lint |
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fc0441a
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You could only make art by setting it free. Anything else was just a memory, no matter how you stored it. On film or paper, sculpted or recorded.
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Charles de Lint |
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76c55fb
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Can you remember how you felt when you were communicating through your artwork? Not just the sense of completion, but the sense of rightness- the sense that you had brought to life something that could live beyond your sphere of being, that held in it far more potential than you ever realized you were imbuing in the work?
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completion
rightness
potential
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Charles de Lint |
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93f9dda
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Everybody's got to make a buck--the trick is, either find something you like to do, or do something to pay the rent that doesn't take too much out of you. Capisce?
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Charles de Lint |
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86147ca
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Just stories. You and me, everybody, we're a set of stories, and what those stories are is what makes us what we are.
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Charles de Lint |
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92e81df
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Myslela jsem si, ze se to stava, kdyz je clovek stary." Denzil se zakuckal. "A ty jsi pomerne stara, myslim. Sedmnact, neni-liz pravda?" "Osmnact. A citim se jako starena."
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Charles de Lint |
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0736b3d
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She's old, is Granny Weather, he says, and cranky, too, but there's more magic in one of her toenails than most of us will find in a lifetime.
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Charles de Lint |
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949859f
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understanding that, for all that they knew so little of each other, there was something deep inside each of them that saw a kindred spirit in the other.
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Charles de Lint |
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31316ae
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One expected growth, change; without it, the world was less, the well of inspiration dried up, the muses fled.
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Charles de Lint |
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8497a59
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We have not inherited the earth from our fathers, we are borrowing it from our children.
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Charles de Lint |
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2a9f756
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Yes, no. I don't know. It's all so confusing. I'm just a kid." Abuelo smiled. "You kept saying that while you told me your story, but what does it mean?" "That I'm too young to have to be making decisions like this." "You're never too young to do the right thing," Abuelo said."
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Charles de Lint |
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5acca97
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Nothing's free in this world," Zeffy told her, "except leftovers and friendship, and even friendship costs. The difference is, usually we don't mind paying the coin it requires."
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Charles de Lint |
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206ed90
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The past scampers like an alleycat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter--here ink is smeared on a page, there lies an old photograph with a chewed corner, elsewhere still, a nest has been made of old newspapers, the headlines running one into the other to make strange declarations.
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Charles de Lint |
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5195b77
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I don't know," Kerry said. "It doesn't feel like any medicine I ever took before." She raised a hand to her forehead. "It really does feel like a light, shining inside me. How did you put it there?" Maida laughed. "You're so funny! I didn't put it there. Nobody can do that--not even Raven." "But--" "It was always there. I just made it a little brighter so that you could find it." --
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Charles de Lint |
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16aaeab
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What Jilly liked best about him was his theory of consensual reality, the idea that things exist because we agree that they exist.
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Charles de Lint |
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5fa11c9
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Maybe there's something you can learn from being a cat instead of a little girl." "What"
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Charles de Lint |
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e23653c
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leaned forward as well. He put his hand behind her head and gently pulled her toward him and then he kissed her in a way Izzy had never been kissed before. There was tenderness in the soft brush of his lips, but urgency as well; he was utterly focused upon the act, putting all of his attention on her and the contact of their lips until Izzy felt she was swimming through thickened air.
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Charles de Lint |
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1a713c0
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But the evil people do, that's their responsibility. The burden they have to carry. Sure, when we see 'em starting on causing some hurt, we've got to try and stop 'em, but mostly what the rest of us should be concerning ourselves with is doing right by others. Every time you do a good turn, you shine the light a little farther into the dark. And the thing is, even when we're gone, that light's going to keep shining on, pushing the shadows b..
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Charles de Lint |
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ee0a2f7
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Everything already talks," Joe told her. "Plants, animals, even that old truck of mine. The trick is figuring out their language, learning to hear what they're saying so that it makes sense."
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Charles de Lint |
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d274f07
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I figure all oracular devices are just a way for us to focus on what we already know, but can't quite grab onto. It works the same as a ritual does in a church: You get enough people focused on something, things happen. The way I see it is, it doesn't much matter what the device is. It's just got to be interesting enough so that your attention doesn't stray. Fellow reading the fortune, fellow having it read--same difference. They've both go..
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Charles de Lint |
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0d99ad5
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When I first began my career I had one dictum that I set myself: to be paid for my work, but not to work for pay. Fame makes it that much easier to follow that maxim." He gave her a sharp look. "At least it does so long as I recognize when I am beginning to paint the obvious, rather than painting what I must express. People would rather you did the same thing over and over again and it becomes very easy to fall into their trap--particularly..
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Charles de Lint |
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a960c14
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There's stories and then there's stories," he said, interrupting her. "The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you've heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on and the giving only makes you feel better."
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Charles de Lint |
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1acdf9a
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There is no event so momentous that it hasn't been seen before, no trouble so grand that won't look small from another perspective.
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Charles de Lint |
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e0ab960
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the lies in fiction are such an effective way to tell emotional truths.
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Charles de Lint |
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48f5017
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You lose your pride and you lose everything. We don't want to know the stories, because we don't want to remember. But we've got to take the good with the bad and make ourselves whole again, be proud again. A proud people can never be defeated. They lose battles, but they'll never lose the war, because for them to lose the war you've got to go out and kill each and every one of them, everybody with even a drop of the blood. And even then, t..
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Charles de Lint |
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2d27dc9
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When all's said and done," Mally said, "all roads lead to the same end. So it's not so much which road you take, as how you take it." --
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Charles de Lint |
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fe8b2f8
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It's a mistake to go poking about in your own past," she'd told her. "It makes you shrink into yourself. Every time you return you get smaller and more transparent. Go back often enough and you might vanish altogether. We're meant to put the past behind us and be the people we are now, Izzy, not who we were."
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Charles de Lint |
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7cd41ca
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There was dusting and sweeping to do, books to be put away. Lovely books. It didn't matter to Dick if they were serious leather-bound tomes or paperbacks with garish covers. He loved them all, for they were filled with words, and words were magic to this hob. Wise and clever humans had used some marvelous spell to imbue each book with every kind of story and character you could imagine, and many you couldn't. If you knew the key to unlock t..
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Charles de Lint |