Success Quote by Charles de Lint

De Lint’s line is a quiet rebuke to the modern cult of the finish line. It refuses the familiar narrative where “real life” starts only after you’ve arrived: the book deal, the house, the healed heart, the stable self. Instead, he collapses the false border between process and payoff. The road isn’t a tedious corridor you endure; it is the destination’s raw material, the part that actually changes you.

The intent is motivational, but not in the hustle-poster way. De Lint, a writer whose work often treats the everyday as a threshold to the uncanny, is pointing at a more mystical realism: meaning doesn’t suddenly switch on at the endpoint. If you want a life that feels like something, you can’t outsource it to a future version of yourself.

The subtext carries a critique of instrumental thinking, the idea that everything is valuable only as a means to an end. That mindset breeds impatience, self-contempt, and the perpetual sense of being “behind.” By declaring the road “essentially a part” of the destination, he reframes struggle and repetition as constitutive, not incidental. The failures, detours, and small disciplines aren’t embarrassing prehistory; they are the architecture.

Context matters here: de Lint writes from within a genre tradition (urban fantasy) that loves liminal spaces and slow transformations. The sentence works because it’s both philosophically neat and emotionally disarming: it gives you permission to inhabit the middle, while still honoring ambition. It doesn’t lower the goal. It raises the value of the getting there.