Time & Perspective Quote by Charles de Lint

Reality, in de Lint's framing, isn’t discovered so much as agreed upon. The line has the sly authority of a campfire truth: simple wording, heavy implications. “A long time ago” pushes the origin point safely out of reach, into the murk of tradition where decisions harden into “just the way things are.” Then he slips in the real provocation: “a bunch of people.” Not philosophers on mountaintops, not scientists in labs, just an unspecified crowd. The casualness is the critique. If the rules of the real were set by ordinary, contingent humans, then they’re vulnerable to revision.

The phrase “general consensus” sounds democratic, but it’s a pressure point. Consensus can be collective wisdom; it can also be a mask for who had the power to define terms. De Lint, a writer known for urban fantasy’s porous borders between the mundane and the mythic, is winking at the genre’s central argument: the world is bigger than the sanctioned map. Magic, mystery, spirituality, folk knowledge, even marginalized experiences get labeled “not real” largely because they don’t fit the approved story.

“Most of us have been going along with it ever since” lands like an accusation wrapped in a shrug. The “most” implies dissent exists, and the “going along” suggests compliance more than conviction. Subtext: we’ve mistaken social habit for truth. Contextually, it reads as a late-20th-century skepticism toward institutions and narratives, but it also functions as a writer’s manifesto: fiction isn’t escapism; it’s a tool for prying open the consensus and asking who it serves.