Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles de Lint

Expectation does a lot of quiet work here: it turns growth from a nice-to-have into the basic operating system of a meaningful life. De Lint frames change not as disruption but as oxygen. Without it, “the world was less” - a blunt, deflationary sentence that treats stagnation as a kind of shrinking reality. The line isn’t just lamenting boredom; it’s diagnosing a spiritual malnutrition. When nothing evolves, perception dulls, and the world contracts to what you already know.

The metaphor of “the well of inspiration dried up” grounds that contraction in a writer’s body-language. Inspiration isn’t lightning; it’s water you draw, and it depends on replenishment. That’s the subtextual warning to artists and anyone who lives by curiosity: your creativity is not a private reservoir of talent, it’s an ecosystem. Change feeds it.

Then de Lint reaches for “the muses fled,” borrowing the old classical machinery of art-making. It’s a knowingly mythic flourish, but not mere decoration. It externalizes the loss: when you stop growing, it feels as if something outside you has abandoned ship. That’s how creative drought often registers - not as a choice you made, but as a relationship that cooled.

Context matters: de Lint, a fantasy writer whose work often stitches the everyday to the magical, treats imagination as a lived practice rather than a rare gift. The sentence reads like a credo for urban fantasy itself: the world stays enchanted only if you keep moving through it, changing enough to keep seeing it anew.