Rhonda > Rhonda's Quotes

“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.”
― Charles de Lint

“Remember the quiet wonders. The world has more need of them than it has for warriors.”
― Charles de Lint, Moonheart

“That's the thing about magic; you've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you.”
― Charles de Lint

“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.”
― Charles de Lint

“All my life I've wanted to be the kid who gets to cross over into the magical kingdom. I devoured those books by C.S. Lewis and William Dunthorn, Ellen Wentworth, Susan Cooper, and Alan Garner. When I could get them from the library, I read them out of order as I found them, and then in order, and then reread them all again, many times over. Because even when I was a child 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 of my life. There was a knowledge – 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.
That's the reason I’ve yearned so desperately to experience the wonder, the mystery, the beauty of that world beyond the World As It Is. It's because I know that somewhere across the border there's a place for me. A place of safety and strength and learning, where I can become who I'm supposed to be. I've tried forever to be that person here, but whatever I manage to accomplish in the World As It Is only seems to be an echo of what I could be in that other place that lies hidden somewhere beyond the borders.”
― Charles de Lint

“Tattoos...are the stories in your heart, written on your skin.”
― Charles de Lint, The Mystery of Grace

“The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.”
― Charles de Lint, The Blue Girl

“Anytime that is ‘betwixt and between’ or transitional is the faeries’ favorite time. They inhabit transitional spaces: the bottom of the garden, existing in a space between manmade cultivation and wilderness. Look for them in the space between nurture and nature, they are to be found at all boarders and boundaries, or on the edges of water where it is neither land nor lake, neither path nor pond. They come when we are half-asleep. They come at moments when we least expect them; when our rational mind balances with the fluid irrational.”
― Brian Froud

“I feel that what you should illustrate is the space between the words. It's the betweenness, the otherness, that gives depth and dimension.”
― Brian Froud

“I've been actively engaged with mythic imagery ever since I picked up that Rackham book, but it really came into focus for me when I moved from London to the country. As I walked the extraordinary landscape of Dartmoor, I looked at the trees and the rocks and the hills and I could see the personality in those forms...then they metamorphosed under my pencil into faeries, goblins and trolls. After Alan and I published "Faeries", he moved on from the subject of faery folklore to illustrate Tolkien and other literary works...while I discovered that my own exploration of Faerieland had only just begun. In the countryside, the old stories seemed to come alive around me; the faeries were a tangible aspect of the landscape, pulses of spirit, emotion, and light. They "insisted" on taking form under my pencil, emerging on the page before me cloaked in archetypal shapes drawn from nature and myth. I'd attracted their attention, you see, and they hadn't finished with me yet.”
― Brian Froud

“I paint the spirit and soul of what I see.”
― Brian Froud

“Nor did she merely smile, she glowed with inner goodness that made him think of the vast iron cookstove in his grandmother's kitchen back on the farm. Here, he knew by certain instinct, was a woman who made wonderful cookies and would give you some.”
― Charlotte MacLeod, The Luck Runs Out

“Don't you have something plain and wholesome, like scotch or bourbon?”
― Charlotte MacLeod, Vane Pursuit

“The trip itself was the usual...adulation from all sides, rose petals strewn in my path everywhere I went, silver bells festooning the howdah on my private white elephant...you know the drill. I maintained my customary demeanor or regal calm and enigmatic silence throughout.”
― Charlotte MacLeod

“There are no sick people in North Oxford. They are either dead or alive.It's sometimes difficult to tell the difference , that's all.”
― Barbara Pym, Crampton Hodnet

“A bookseller," said Grandfather, "is the link between mind and mind, the feeder of the hungry, very often the binder up of wounds. There he sits, your bookseller, surrounded by a thousand minds all done up neatly in cardboard cases; beautiful minds, courageous minds, strong minds, wise minds, all sorts and conditions. There come into him other minds, hungry for beauty, for knowledge, for truth, for love, and to the best of his ability he satisfies them all....Yes....It's a great vocation....Moreover his life is one of wide horizons. He deals in the stuff of eternity and there's no death in a bookseller's shop. Plato and Jane Austen and Keats sit side by side behind his back, Shakespeare is on his right hand and Shelley on his left.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, A City of Bells

“Humanity can be roughly divided into three sorts of people - those who find comfort in literature, those who find comfort in personal adornment, and those who find comfort in food;”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Little White Horse

“In times of storm and tempest, of indecision and desolation, a book already known and loved makes better reading than something new and untried ... nothing is so warming and companionable.”
― Elizabeth Goudge

“You know the people," said Pamela, "who say, 'Of course I love reading, but I've no time, alas!' as if everyone who loves reading doesn't make time.”
― O. Douglas, Penny Plain

“That evening the men worked late to finish and I raked the fields in the dusk with Alison, stopping to pick the dog-roses which were like white stars in the hedges, then hastening after my sister. Dumbledores boomed as they struck our dresses, a hedgehog walked in the path, and we could hear the barking of a fox in the wood. Night”
― Alison Uttley, A Traveller in Time

“Dick and Tot walked down the lane together, deep in a conversation of silence.”
― William Mayne, Ravensgill

“I can stand you all being a lot worse now, because I can always go there. It's when I haven't got anywhere to go that I get mad straight away. But if I go there for half an hour it's beautiful to come back.”
― William Mayne, A Parcel of Trees

“But the grandmother too was proud of her birth, and she loved her native land as a conqueror never could.”
― L.M. Boston, The Stones of Green Knowe

“The nightingale’s song was as old as the coming of summer after winter. He did not doubt it had started with the creation of the world. He did not need to fear things for being old. It was rather a reason for loving them that they had been there so comfortingly long, like hills.”
― L.M. Boston, The Stones of Green Knowe

“And I realized that this is what it's like to be an adult, learning to pick from a lot of bad choices and do the best you can with that dreadful compromise. Learning to smile, to put your best foot forward, when the world around you seems to have collapsed in its entirety, become a place of isolation, a sepia photograph of its former illusion.”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

“If we don't think about our death until we die, how can we decide how we want to live?”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

“Then I looked out onto the horizon myself and realized that loss is the same wherever you go: overwhelming, inexorable, deafening. How resilient human beings are that we can learn slowly to carry on when we are left all alone, left to fill the void as best we can. Or disappear into it.”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

“Human nature defeats me sometimes, how greed and spite can lurk so divisively around the utmost courage and sacrifice.”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

“I took a deep breath of the syrupy sweetness of summer, suffused with bees and birds, and I thought to myself how beautiful this world can be. How lucky we are to be here, to be part of it, for however long we have.”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

“A sense of responsibility— or was it guilt?— hung over me, that I was in some way at fault because of cowering to all these pompous men all these years, when I should have had the bravery to reclaim my own mind. That if we women had done this years ago, before the last war, before this one, we’d be in a very different world.”
― Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir