Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles de Lint

De Lint’s line flatters the reader with a dangerous premise: enchantment isn’t a fixed property of the world, it’s a relationship. “Fey wonders” suggests not just magic but the old, sidelong kind - half seen, easily offended, more rumor than spectacle. The trick is that he doesn’t argue for fairies; he argues for perception as an ethical stance. Wonders “only exist” while someone has “the sight” to see them, turning imagination into a form of stewardship. Stop looking, stop believing, stop making room for the uncanny, and the world obliges by going dead.

That’s classic de Lint, whose urban fantasy has always been less about escapism than about attention: the alleyway as threshold, the overlooked person as messenger, the city as a palimpsest of stories. The subtext is cultural and political. Modern life trains us into a narrowed gaze - productivity, cynicism, screens, the safe interpretive habits that keep mystery at arm’s length. De Lint pushes back with a quiet ultimatum: the price of “growing up” is often a kind of sensory austerity, a refusal to entertain what can’t be monetized or verified.

The wording makes the reader complicit. “Those with the sight” creates an in-group, an almost folkloric elect, but it’s not about superiority; it’s about vulnerability. Sight can be lost. The line reads like a spell cast over a community of readers: keep your eyes open, keep telling stories, keep welcoming strangeness, or watch the world become exactly as disenchanted as you insist it is.