"They say we get born wise, but we have that wisdom studied and bullied out of us when we’re growing up and it takes us a lifetime to get back to being wise once more."
Charles deLint p 313 Trader

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it’s only by this meeting that a new world is born.
Anais Nin

"But music has its own enchantment and the first few notes of an old tune are all that it requires to transform any site into a place of magic, even if that location is no more than a windowless office cubicle in the Old Firehall’s basement."
Charles deLint Dreams Underfoot "Ghosts of Wind and Shadow"

There’s nothing more practical than a good abstract theory.
Cohem

"’Faerie music is the wind,’ he says, ‘and their movement is the play of shadow cast by moonlight, or starlight, or no light at all. Faerie lives like a ghost beside us, but only the city remembers. But then the city never forgets anything.’"
Charles deLint Dreams Underfoot "Ghosts of Wind and Shadow"

The teacher, if he is indeed wise, does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.
Kahlil Gibran

"’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. The others are just words on a page.’"
Charles deLint Dreams Underfoot "The Conjure Man"

"Like burrs old names get stuck to each other and to anyone who walks among them."
Paul Hazel Undersea

"We live in a consensual reality where things exist because we want them to exist. I believe in Goon, Goon believes in Goon, and you, presented with his undeniable presence, tea tray in hand, believe in Goon as well. Yet, if you were to listen to the world at large, Goon is nothing more than a figment of some fevered writer’s imagination—a literary construct, an artistic representation of something that can’t possibly exist in the world as we know it."
Charles deLint Dreams Underfoot "Uncle Dobbin’s Parrot Fair"

The thing to remember, is that artists are magical beings. They’re the only people other than the gods who can grant immortality.
Matt Ruff Fool on the Hill

"Sometimes your dreams go deeper than you remember after you’ve woken from them."
Charles deLint Trader p 428

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

"That’s how it works with instrumental music, and it’s probably why the best of it is so enduring: the listener takes away whatever he or she wants from it. Say the composer was trying to tell us about the aftermath of some great battle. When we hear it, the music might speak to us of a parent we’ve lost, a friend’s struggle with some debilitating disease, a doe standing at the edge of a forest at twilight, or any of a thousand other unrelated things."
Charles deLint "Paperjack"

"It’s always good when you come into contact with other players and you discover you’re not this freak, that there are others...playing this strange instrument."
Kathryn Tickell

"I’ve got such an open mind that Geordie says I’ve got a hole in it, but I’ve been that way for as long as I can remember. It’s not so much that I’m gullible—though I’ve been called that and less charitable things in my time; it’s more that I’m willing to just suspend my disbelief until whatever I’m considering had been thoroughly debunked to my satisfaction."
Charles deLint Dreams Underfoot "Tallulah"

I am afraid to tell you who I am because if I tell you who I am, you may not like who I am, and it’s all that I have.
?

"Zinc was privy to secrets. He could hear voices in lights. He know that there was more to be seen in the world if you watched it from the corner of your eye than head on."
Charles deLint Dreams Underfoot "Freewheeling"

I do what the voices in my head tell me to do.
?

Something lives only as long as the last person who remembers it.
Native American Saying

Time is passing
Time has fled
We’re waiting in strange terrain.
?

"I don’t think the world is the way we like to think it is...I don’t think it’s one solid world, but many, thousands upon thousands of them—as many as there are people—because each person perceives the world in his or her own way; each lives in his or her own world. Sometimes they connect, for a moment or more rarely, for a lifetime, but mostly we are alone, each living in our own world, suffering our small deaths."
Charles deLint Dreams Underfoot "Small Deaths"

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