Memory and Dream Quotes

“The stronger a woman gets, the more insecure the men in her life feel. It doesn’t work that way for a woman. We celebrate strength--in our partners as well as in ourselves.”
― Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream

“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.”
― Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream

“[She] had felt straight away that she wasn’t meeting a new friend, but recognizing an old one.”
― Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream

“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...”
― Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream

“Time had ceased to feel linear. She looked up through the crisscrossing branches, thick with buds, into the night sky. The stars tugged at her gaze, trying to pull her up among them, or she was pulling them down to her. She was on the verge of some great discovery, she realized, but she had no idea what it was, what it related to, whether it even had anything to do with her at all. Was she a participant, or an observer? Did the world center around her, or could it carry on quite easily without her input? Looking up at those stars, feeling the embrace of their light as it enfolded her, she felt both small and large, as though everything mattered and nothing did. When someone crouched down beside her it took years for her to turn her head to see who it was. All she could make out was a dark shape, a vague outline of head and shoulders silhouetted against the stars, the rest of the body lost in the shadows of the rose bushes.”
― Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream

“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.”
― Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream

“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.”
― Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream

“But this was what happened when you mined the past. You gave up control of the present.”
― Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream

“One expected growth, change; without it, the world was less, the well of inspiration dried up, the muses fled.”
― Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream

“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 when you’re young and hungry. But the more you do so, the nearer you are drawn to something you should not be a part of that homogeneity that is the death of any form of creative expression.”
― Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream

“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.”
― Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream

“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.”
― Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream

“Biographies bore me. I don’t care how insightful a biographer is, no one knows what’s going on inside someone else’s head. Autobiographies bore me, too, because we lie to ourselves even more than a biographer does.”
― Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream

“That’s the trouble when you meet famous people sometimes – they’re all wrong.”
― Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream