Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles de Lint

Wonder isn’t a feature of the landscape in Charles de Lint’s line; it’s a pact between the world and the people willing to look at it sideways. De Lint, a writer steeped in urban fantasy, knows the trick his genre pulls: it smuggles the miraculous into the everyday, then asks why most of us walk past it like a closed storefront. “The few wonders of the world” lands with a deliberate smallness. Not “infinite wonders,” not even “many.” Wonder is scarce, fragile, easily extinguished by routine.

The real knife is in “only exist.” He’s not arguing that wonders are hidden; he’s arguing they’re contingent. They survive on perception, attention, a cultivated kind of “sight” that’s closer to receptivity than eyesight. That word choice carries a quiet rebuke: if the wonders vanish, it’s not because the world has emptied out, but because we’ve lost the habit of noticing. It’s also a defense of storytelling itself. Fantasy isn’t escapism here; it’s training. Reading (and living) becomes an exercise in re-enchantment, a resistance to the flattening pressures of cynicism, overwork, and algorithmic distraction.

There’s a communal undertone, too: “those” implies a group, a lineage of lookers. Wonder persists as culture, not just private mood. De Lint’s intent feels less like mystical assertion than a pragmatic plea: protect your capacity for awe, because your attention is the oxygen that keeps the marvelous alive.