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I've Always Been Aware Of The Otherworld, Of Spirits That Exist In That Twilight Place That Lies In The Corner Of Our Eyes, Of Fairie And Stranger Things Still That We Spy Only When We're Not Really Paying Attention To Them, Whispers And Flickering Shadows, Here One Moment, Gone The Instant We Turn Our Heads For A Closer Look. But I Couldn't Always Find Them. And When I Did, For A Long Time I Thought They Were Only This Excess Of Imagination That I Carry Around Inside Me, That Somehow It Was Leaking Out Of Me Into The World.

-Charles De Lint

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I've Always Been Aware

Charles De Lint

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I've Always Been Aware Of The Otherworld, Of Spirits That Exist In That Twilight Place That Lies In The Corner Of Our Eyes, Of Fairie And Stranger Things Still That We Spy Only When We're Not Really Paying Attention To Them, Whispers And Flickering Shadows, Here One Moment, Gone The Instant We Turn Our Heads For A Closer Look. But I Couldn't Always Find Them. And When I Did, For A Long Time I Thought They Were Only This Excess Of Imagination That I Carry Around Inside Me, That Somehow It Was Leaking Out Of Me Into The World.

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The Thing I Like So Much About Short Stories Is That There Isn't As Much Of An Investment Of Time So I'm Free To Experiment More. If It Doesn't Work Out, I've Only Lost A Week Or Two Of Work. If I Screw Up A Novel I've Lost At Least A Year's Worth Of Work. But The Nice Thing Is That Those Experiments With Short Stories Can Be Carried Over To Novels When The Experiments Do Work.

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The Best Change You Can Make Is To Hold Up A Mirror So That People Can Look Into It And Change Themselves. That's The Only Way A Person Can Be Changed." By Looking Into Yourself," Zia Said. "even If You Have To Look Into A Mirror That's Outside Yourself To Do It." "and You Know," Maida Added. "that Mirror Can Be A Story You Hear, Or Just Someone Else's Eyes. Anything That Reflects Back So You Can See Yourself In It.

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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 Every Human Mind. Legend And Myth, All Tangled In An Alphabet Of Trees Remembered, Not Always With Understanding, But With Wonder. With Awe.

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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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... We Chase After Ghosts And Spirits And Are Left Holding Only Memories And Dreams. It's Not That We Want What We Can't Have; It's That We've Held All We Could Want And Then Had To Watch It Slip Away.

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Once Upon A Time

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[she] Had Felt Straight Away That She Wasn’t Meeting A New Friend, But Recognizing An Old One.

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Others Happiness

By Enlarging Your Knowledge Of Things, You Will Find Your Knowledge Of Self Is Enlarged.

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The Problem With Children Is That You Have To Put Up With Their Parents.

You've Got To Find Yourself First. Everything Else'll Follow.

Finding Yourself

I Love This World ... That Is What Rules My Life. When I Die, I Want To Have Done All In My Power To Leave It In A Better State Than It Was In When I Found It. At The Same Time I Know That This Can Never Be. The World Has Grown So Complex That One Voice Can Do Little To Alter It Any Longer. That Doesn't Stop Me From Doing What I Can But It Makes The Task Hard. The Successes Are So Small, The Failures So Large And Many. It's Like Trying To Stem A Storm With One's Bare Hands.

Labels Don't Mean Much To Me One Way Or Another -- Except When They Close The Minds Of Potential Readers. I'd Much Rather We Do Away With Genres And Simply File Everything Under Fiction. I Know It Can Work -- One Of My Favourite Record Stores (waterloo Music In Austin) Simply Files Everything Alphabetically And No One Seems To Have Much Problem Finding What They're Looking For.

You Can Take The Woman Outta The Trash, But You Can't Take The Trash Out A The Woman.

It's All A Matter Of Paying Attention, Being Awake In The Present Moment, And Not Expecting A Huge Payoff. The Magic In This World Seems To Work In Whispers And Small Kindnesses.

Everything Has A Spirit And It's All Connected. If You Think About That, If You Live Your Life By It, Then You're Less Likely To Cause Any Hurt. It's Like How Our Bodies Go Back Into The Ground When We Die, So That Connects Us To The Earth. If You Dump Trash, You're Dumping It On Your And My Ancestors. Or To Bring It Down To Its Simplest Level: Treat Everything And Everybody The Way You Want To Be Treated, Because When You Hurt Someone, You're Only Hurting Yourself.

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.

World Suffering

Fairy Tales And Mythology Have Always Been An Exaggerated Distillation Of The Real World. Think Of Them As Blueprints For How To Deal With A Multitude Of Situations That Can Arise In A Person's Life. The Beauty Of Them Is That Their Analogies Resonate So Deeply And They Also Entertain While They Teach.

I Think You're All Mad. But That's Part And Parcel Of Being An Artistic Genius, Isn't It?

When All's Said And Done, All Roads Lead To The Same End. So It's Not So Much Which Road You Take, As How You Take It.

Most Times We Only See Things For The Way We Are. But We're Good At Lying To Ourselves. Sometimes We Need Somebody Who's Not Living In Our Skin To Point Out How Things Really Are.

"... He Had Understood, Better Than Anyone ... The Beauty That Grew Out Of The Simple Knowledge That Everything, No Matter How Small Or Large It Might Be, Was A Perfect Example Of What It Was."

There Are As Many Stories To Be Told As There Are People To Tell Them About; Only The Mean-spirited Would Consider There To Be A Competition At All.

What We Take From The Spirit World Is Only A Reflection Of What Lies Inside Ourselves.

Don't Start Brooding About That, Too," She Says. "everybody's Got A Piece Of Stranger Inside Them. It's What Lets Us Surprise Ourselves And Keeps Things Interesting." -lupita

In The Dark Attics Of Our Minds, All Times Mingle.

As Children, We Come Into The World With A Natural Desire To Both Speak And Draw. Society Makes Sure That We Learn Language Properly, Right From The Beginning, But Art Is Treated As A Gift Of Innate Genius, Something We Either Have Or Don't.

Growing Up, I'd Already Decided I Wanted To Be A Beatnik. A Bohemian Poet, I Thought. Or A Musician. Maybe An Artist. I'd Dress In Black Turtlenecks And Smoke Gitanes. I'd Listen To Cool Jazz In Clubs, Getting Up To Read Devastating Truths From My Notebook, Leaning Against The Microphone, Cigarette Dangling From My Hand.

Without Mysteries, Life Would Be Very Dull Indeed. What Would Be Left To Strive For If Everything Were Known?

I Find The Characters In My Head And The More I Write About Them, The Better I Get To Know Them.

I Don't Want To Live In The Kind Of World Where We Don't Look Out For Each Other. Not Just The People That Are Close To Us, But Anybody Who Needs A Helping Hand. I Cant Change The Way Anybody Else Thinks, Or What They Choose To Do, But I Can Do My Bit.

How Hard Would It Be To Ask Children What They See In Their Heads? How Big Should The House Be In Comparison To The Family Standing In Front Of It? What Is It About The Anatomy Of The People That Doesn't Look Right? Then Let Them Try It Again. Teach Them To Learn How To See And Ask Questions.

The Thing With Pretending You're In A Good Mood Is That Sometimes You Can Actually Trick Yourself Into Feeling Better.

Gina Always Believed There Was Magic In The World. "but It Doesn't Work In The Way It Does In Fairy Tales," She Told Me. "it Doesn't Save Us. We Have To Save Ourselves.

Magic In The World

The Excitement I Get From Writing Is Finding Out Each Day What Happens Next.

The Family We Choose For Ourselves Is More Important Than The One We Were Born Into; That People Have To Earn Our Respect And Trust, Not Have It Handed To Them Simply Because Of Genetics.

I'm Not...' Angharad Began, But Then She Thought. Not What? Not A Bad Person? Perhaps. But Had She Never Known Anger? Never Held Unkind Thoughts? The Stranger's Observation Was Valid. No One Was Innocent Of Darkness.

Music's Always Part Of My Writing. I Think All Art Is Interconnected. You Can't Create Or Experience One Without Its Influences Bleeding Into Another. In My Writing, Music's Mostly Something That Feeds My Inspiration And Mood While I'm Writing, But It's Also Taught Me How To Score Scenes And Even Novels. The Rise And Fall Of The Storyline Echoes The Flow Of A Good Piece Of Music.

I Was Going Through The Motions Of Life, Instead Of Really Living, And There's No Excuse For That. It's Not Something I'll Let Happen To Me Again.

We Call Them Faerie. We Don't Believe In Them. Our Loss.

I Envy The Music Lovers Hear. I See Them Walking Hand In Hand, Standing Close To Each Other In A Queue At A Theater Or Subway Station, Heads Touching While They Sit On A Park Bench, And I Ache To Hear The Song That Plays Between Them: The Stirring Chords Of Romance's First Bloom, The Stately Airs That Whisper Between A Couple Long In Love. You Can See It In The Way They Look At Each Other... You Can Almost Hear It. Almost, But Not Quite, Because The Music Belongs To Them And All You Can Have Of It Is A Vague Echo That Rises Up From The Bittersweet Murmur And Shuffle Of Your Own Memories.

Children Are The Brightest Treasures We Bring Forth Into This World, But Too Large A Percentage Of The Population Continues To Treat Them As Inconveniences And Nuisances, When They're Not Treating Them As Possessions Or Toys.

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It's The Questions We Ask, The Journey We Take To Get To Where We Are Going That Is More Important Than The Actual Answer.

Remember The Quiet Wonders. The World Has More Need Of Them Than It Has For Warriors.

The Real Trouble Comes From Not Knowing What We Really Want In The First Place.

Thing Is, While I Know Better, I Like Sounding Ignorant. Talk Like This And People Figure You're About As Dumb As A Fencepost, Which Suits Me Fine. Makes It All That Much Easier To Take Advantage Of 'em.

I Like Living In The City Where I Have All My Books And Music And Can Go Out To Buy That Night's Dinner Or Easily See A Band. But I Also Like The Wild Places, Especially Hiking In The Desert And The Eastern Woodlands. Do I Have To Choose?

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.

A Name Can't Begin To Encompass The Sum Of All Her Parts. But That's The Magic Of Names, Isn't It? That The Complex, Contradictory Individuals We Are Can Be Called Up Complete And Whole In Another Mind Through The Simple Sorcery Of A Name.

People Want To Know Those Details. They Think It Gives Them Greater Insight Into A Piece Of Art, But When They Approach A Painting In Such A Manner, They Are Belittling Both The Artist’s Work And Their Own Ability To Experience It. Each Painting I Do Says Everything I Want To Say On Its Subject And In Terms Of That Painting, And Not All The Trivia In The World Concerning My Private Life Will Give The Viewer More Insight Into It Than What Hangs There Before Their Eyes. Frankly, As Far As I’m Concerned, Even Titling A Work Is An Unnecessary Concession.

It's Not Something You Can Prove....i Know You Hate To Hear This, But You Either Have It, Or You Don't.

Like Legend And Myth, Magic Fades When It Is Unused.

My Characters Seem Real Because They Are Drawn From The Realities Of My Life. I Didn't Have To Research Their Pain; I Just Tapped Into My Own.

You Know How We'd Get Along Better? If Everybody'd Just Remember How We're All Related. White, Black, Asian, Skin. No Difference. All The Bloodlines Go Back To That One Old Mama In Africa.

Magic's Never What You Expect It To Be, But It's Often What You Need.

That's The Thing With Magic. You've Got To Know It's Still Here, All Around Us, Or It Just Stays Invisible For You.

I Don't Know What's Waiting For Us When We Die--something Better, Something Worse. I Only Know I'm Not Ready To Find Out Yet.

My Theory About Writing Is That One Should Write Books You'd Like To Read, But No One Else Has Written Yet. So, As Long As I Stick With That, I'm Entertaining Myself, And Then Hopefully My Readers As Well. I Hope To God I Realize That I'm Repeating Myself, If I Ever Do. But If I Don't, I'm Sure My Readers Will Let Me Know.

I Wouldn't Like To Live In A World Where Everything's As Cut-and-dried As Most People Think It Is

Like Legend And Myth, Magic Fades When It Is Unused - Hence All The Old Tales Of Elfin Kingdoms Moving Further And Further Away From Our World, Or That Magical Beings Require Our Faith, Our Belief In Their Existence, To Survive. That Is A Lie. All They Require Is Our Recognition.

The Beginning Of A Friendship, The Fact That Two People Out Of The Thousands Around Them Can Meet And Connect And Become Friends, Seems Like A Kind Of Magic To Me. But Maintaining A Friendship Requires Work. I Don't Mean That As A Bad Thing. Good Art Requires Work As Well.

I've Always Believed The Lies We Use To Make Our Fictions Reveal The Truth With Far More Honesty Than Any History Or Herstory Or Life Story.

Tattoos...are The Stories In Your Heart, Written On Your Skin.

Only Fools Think They're Wise; The Rest Of Us Just Muddle Through As We Can.

I Finally Figured Out That I’m Solitary By Nature, But At The Same Time I Know So Many People; So Many People Think They Own A Piece Of Me. They Shift And Move Under My Skin, Like A Parade Of Memories That Simply Won’t Go Away. It Doesn’t Matter Where I Am, Or How Alone--i Always Have Such A Crowded Head.

Not Everything Has To Mean Something. Some Things Just Are.

The Best Artists Know What To Leave Out. They Know How Much Of The Support Should Show Through As The Pigment Is Applied, What Details Aren't Necessary.

As The New Work Fills My Notebooks, I've Come To Realize That The Characters In My Stories Were So Real Because I Really Did Want To Get Close To People, I Really Did Want To Know Them. It Was Just Easier To Do It On Paper, One Step Removed.

She Hoped He Was Running To His Red Deer Woman, And That When He Tapped On The Door Of Her Heart, She'd Open It Wide And Let Him In.

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.

It Was All Cheese And Applause.

Every Time You Do A Good Deed You Shine The Light A Little Farther Into The Dark. And The Thing Is, When You're Gone That Light Is Going To Keep Shining On, Pushing The Shadows Back.

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 You Can Get A Good Look At It.

Most Children Are Given Far Too Much Praise For Their Early Drawings, So Much So That They Rarely Learn The Ability To Refine Their First Crude Efforts The Way Their Early Attempts At Language Are Corrected.

Books And Music Saved Me As A Teenager Because It Was Through Them That I Realized That I Wasn't Alone In My Obsessive Love For Words And Music.

It's All Those Stories And How They Braid Together That Tells Us Who And What And Where We Are

Even, She Thought, Even Without The Gift Of Witchsight, There Was More Beauty To Be Found In The World Than Could Ever Be Snared In Language Or Music. And With The Sight.

There Are Few Joys To Compare With The Telling Of A Well-told Tale.

There's Stories And Then There's Stories. 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.

Well, While I Didn't Have The More Extreme Experiences Of Some Of My Characters, I Didn't Exactly Come From The Most Normal Of Households. Or Rather, It Was Normal, In That Dysfunctional Families Appear To Be The Norm.

Dysfunctional Family

Life Is Like Art. You Have To Work Hard To Keep It Simple And Still Have Meaning.

The Trouble With Advice Is That It's Usually Something You Don't Want To Hear.

It's Not All About Getting Your Own Way. Sometimes There's A Bigger Picture.

We're All Made Of Stories. When They Finally Put Us Underground, The Stories Are What Will Go On.

Often The Magical Elements In My Books Are Standing In For Elements Of The Real World, The Small And Magical-in-their-own-right Sorts Of Things That We Take For Granted And No Longer Pay Attention To, Like The Bonds Of Friendship That Entwine Our Own Lives With Those Of Other People And Places.

Under The Skin, Intense Fires Burn.

I Hate The Thought Of Her Being Forced Into A Box That Doesn't Fit Her. Of Having Her Wings Cut Off, Her Sight Blinded, Her Hearing Muted, Her Voice Stilled.

You Don't Have To Be Michelangelo To Teach Basic Art, Just As You Don't Have To Be Shakespeare To Be Able To Teach The Correct Use Of Language.

The Only Real Reason For Self-referencing Is The Fun Factor. It's Fun For The Writer, Getting Little Peeks At What Old Characters Might Be Up To. And It's Fun For Readers To Spot A Familiar Face, Or Pick Up On A Made-up Book Title Or Something From An Earlier Story. I Don't Know That It Does -- Or Even Should -- Contribute To The Story In Hand Being Any Better Than It Would Have Been Without It.

I Can’t Imagine It Now, But I Must’ve Been Innocent At Some Time In My Life. A Baby Don’t Just Get Itself Born Bad, Do It?

Life's An Act Of Magic, Too. Claire Hamill Sings A Line In One Of Her Songs That Really Sums It Up For Me: 'if There's No Magic, There's No Meaning.' Without Magic- Or Call It Wonder, Mystery, Natural Wisdom- Nothing Has Any Depth. It's All Just Surface. You Know: What You See Is What You Get. I Honestly Believe There's More To Everything Than That, Whether It's A Monet Hanging In A Gallery Or Some Old Vagrant Sleeping In An Alley.

Witchery Is Merely A Word For What We Are All Capable Of - Heightened Nightsight, An Empathy Shared With The Beasts, A Utilization Of The More Obscure Abilities Of Our Minds. Nothing That Science Can't Explain Away. Wizardry Is Spells And Enchantments. Fairy Tales.

I Want To Touch The Heart Of The World And Make It Smile.

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 The Stories, While Out Here In The Wide World We Have To Muddle Through As Best We Can On Our Own.

The Past Scampers Like An Alley Cat Through The Present, Leaving The Paw Prints Of Memories Scattered Helter-skelter.

I'm Not Chinese. I Thrive In Interesting Times.

Compromise Is Necessary So Long As You Never Give Up Who You Are. That Isn't Compromise; That's Spiritual Death. You Have To Remain True To Yourself.

Stone Walls Confine A Tinker; Cold Iron Binds A Witch; But A Musician's Music Can Never Be Fettered, For It Lives First In Her Heart And Mind.

The Faerie Represent The Beauty We Don't See, Or Even Choose To Ignore. That's Why I'll Paint Them In Junkyards, Or Fluttering Around A Sleeping Wino. No Place Or Person Is Immune To Spirit. Look Hard Enough, And Everything Has A Story. Everybody Is Important."- Jilly Coppercorn

Write From The Heart, What Has Meaning To You Personally; Have The Patience And Discipline To Sit Down And Do It Every Day Whether You're Feeling Inspired Or Not; Never Be Afraid To Take Chances, In Fact, Make Sure You Take Chances. As Soon As You Become Complacent, You Become Boring ... . Read As Much As Possible, Not Simply In The Genre, Or What You Think You're Interested In, But Other Things As Well.

There Was Too Much Going On Here -- Too Much That Strayed From Odd All The Way Over Into Seriously Weird.

I Believe A Good Writer Can Write A Good Book With Any Sort Of Character, In Any Sort Of Setting, But I Prefer To Write About The Outsider. It Might Just Be Because I've Been One (or Perceived Myself To Be One) For So Much Of My Life. But The Simple Fact Of Being Marginalized Immediately Brings Conflict To A Story Before The Narrative Even Begins, And That's Gold For A Writer Because It Means That Your Character Already Has Depth Before Events Begin To Unfold.

Magic Lies In Between Things, Between The Day And The Night, Between Yellow And Blue, Between Any Two Things.

From The First Time He'd Met Her, He'd Sensed An Air Of Contradiction About Her. She Was Very Much A Woman, But Still Retained A Waiflike Quality. She Could Be Brash, And At Times Deliberately Suggestive, Yet She Was Painfully Shy. She Was Incredibly Easy To Get Along With, Yet She Had Few Friends. She Was A Talented Artist In Her Own Right, But So Self-conscious About Her Work That She Rarely Completed A Piece And Preferred To Work With Other People's Art And Ideas.

Dying Doesn't End Anything - It Just Changes Where You Are

Lies Were Like Having A Pregnant Rabbit. One Day You Had One, But Before You Knew It, There Were Rabbits All Over The Place.

A Body Of Work May Be Reviled - Mostly By Those Who Have No Knowledge Of Its Workings - And Yet Still Carry Elements Of What Can Only Be Considered Eternal Truths.

I Want To Be Magic. I Want To Touch The Heart Of The World And Make It Smile. I Want To Be A Friend Of Elves And Live In A Tree. Or Under A Hill. I Want To Marry A Moonbeam And Hear The Stars Sing. I Don't Want To Pretend At Magic Anymore. I Want To Be Magic.

There Are People Who Take The Heart Out Of You, And There Are People Who Put It Back.

The Real Problem Is, People Think Life Is A Ladder, And It's Really A Wheel.

All My Life I've Wanted To Be The Kid Who Gets To Cross Over Into The Magical Kingdom.

There Is No Plan, No Future Laid Out For Any Of Us Beyond What We Make For Ourselves.

It's Good To Have Mysteries. It Reminds Us That There's More To The World Than Just Making Do And Having A Bit Of Fun.

When You're Invisible, No One Can See That You're Different.

I'm Really Bad At Describing My Books. Journalists Like To Have Things Like "it's The Terminator Meets The Seven Dwarfs." And I Can't Do That With My Books. If I Could, I Probably Wouldn't Write Them.

What I Want To Do Is Travel Deep And Deeper Into The Dreamlands, To Find That Place That I Know Is Waiting For Me Here. My Home.

One Expected Growth, Change; Without It, The World Was Less, The Well Of Inspiration Dried Up, The Muses Fled.

There Are No Happy Endings... There Are No Endings, Happy Or Otherwise. We All Have Our Own Stories Which Are Just Part Of The One Story That Binds Both This World And Faerie. Sometimes We Step Into Each Others Stories - Perhaps Just For A Few Minutes, Perhaps For Years - And Then We Step Out Of Them Again. But All The While, The Story Just Goes On.

What Do They Say About Meeting A Bear In The Woods? Oh Right, You Shouldn't. And To Make Sure You Don't, You Should Make A Lot Of Noise So That They'll Will Know Where You Are And Keep Their Distance Because, Supposedly, They're As Nervous Of Us As We Are Of Them. Which Is All Goo, Except This Bear Doesn't Seem The Least Bit Nervous. He's Giving Me A Look Like I'm Goldilocks, Ate His Porridge, Broke His Chair, Slept In His Bed, And Now It's Payback Time."- Widdershins

It Reminded Me Of That Tongue-in-cheek Quick History Of Art I'd Overheard...used To Be People Couldn't Draw Very Well, Then They Could, And Now They Can't Again.

The Fey Wonders Of The World Only Exist While There Are Those With The Sight To See Them.

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Josh Hutcherson

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