Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles de Lint

Mystery is framed here not as a problem to be solved, but as the fuel that keeps a life from going slack. De Lint’s move is slyly rhetorical: he doesn’t argue for uncertainty, he makes certainty sound like spiritual unemployment. The first sentence is almost conversational, the “very dull indeed” doing a lot of work - it turns the absence of mystery into a mood, a gray, airless condition. Then the second line pivots into a question that corners the reader. If everything is known, striving becomes pointless; ambition collapses into mere maintenance.

That’s the subtext: we like to tell ourselves we chase truth for its own sake, but de Lint suggests we also chase it because chasing is what animates us. Mystery is not just ignorance; it’s a horizon. The quote flatters curiosity while also defending the unknowable - a gentle rebuke to the modern obsession with total explanation, the impulse to render the world fully searchable, fully optimized, fully mapped.

Context matters. De Lint, a key figure in modern fantasy and urban fantasy, writes in a tradition where wonder is not escapism but a way of resisting a flattened reality. His worlds insist that the mundane is porous, that the everyday can still contain the uncanny. Read that way, the line doubles as a manifesto for the genre: fantasy doesn’t deny reality, it re-enchants it by preserving what can’t be neatly accounted for. Mystery becomes a stance against boredom, yes, but also against a culture that mistakes information for meaning.