Love Quote by Charles de Lint

There is ambition in that verb: touch. Not impress, not convince, not conquer. De Lint frames art as contact, a fingertip to the pulse. The “heart of the world” is deliberately impossible-scale, a mythic target that suits a writer whose work often treats the everyday as porous to wonder. He’s not promising to fix the world; he’s trying to reach the part of it that still responds.

The line’s real sharpness is in its gentleness. “Make it smile” reads almost disarmingly small next to “the world,” and that mismatch is the point. De Lint is rejecting the grandiose posture of the artist-as-savior while keeping the artist’s audacity. A smile is minor, temporary, human. It’s also contagious, the kind of shift that changes a room without announcing itself. The subtext: beauty and kindness can be radical without being loud.

Context matters. De Lint came up writing fantasy and urban fantasy at a time when genre work was routinely treated as escape, not engagement. This sentence argues that “escape” can be a route back to feeling: to empathy, to the stunned laugh in dark times, to the reminder that the world is not only machinery and cruelty. It’s a mission statement for storytelling that chooses warmth over cynicism, not because cynicism is false, but because it’s easy. The hardest trick is to stay tender and still be credible.