Love Quote by Charles de Lint

De Lint sets up a medieval little morality play - stone walls, cold iron, tinkers and witches - then slips the knife in with a modern romantic thesis: art is the one contraband no jailer can reliably intercept. The sentence works because it moves in escalating constraints, each one more loaded than the last. A tinker is confined by architecture, a witch by superstition given a metal shape. Those are physical limits backed by social permission to punish. By the time we reach the musician, the apparatus of control looks suddenly clumsy, almost antique.

The subtext is not that musicians are magically immune to harm; its that the real battleground is internal. De Lint relocates freedom from the public square to the private interior: "heart and mind" as the first venue where music happens. That ordering matters. If the music begins as an inward experience, then any attempt to police it must become an attempt to police thought and feeling - which is both more invasive and more likely to fail. The quote flatters creativity, but it also indicts coercion: societies that reach for irons and walls are, by definition, anxious about the ungovernable.

Contextually, this is classic de Lint: urban fantasy that treats folklore as a living grammar for contemporary life. "Cold iron binds a witch" echoes old faerie lore, yet the final claim is less about enchantment than about resilience. Music here becomes a metaphor for identity and imagination - the parts of us institutions keep trying to standardize. The line is reassuring, but not naive: bodies can be restrained; what we carry inside remains a leak in every system.