Top 95 Jane Yolen Quotes
#1. Don't let anyone discourage you from writing. If you become a professional writer, there are plenty of editors, reviewers, critics, and book buyers to do that.
Jane Yolen
#2. If you love a waist, you waste a love.
Jane Yolen
#3. You write to be read. That is the bottom line.
Jane Yolen
#4. We write not just to show off, not just to tell, or only to have written. We write to know ourselves.
Jane Yolen
#5. Ideas are the cheapest part of the writing. They are free. The hard part is what you do with ideas you've gathered.
Jane Yolen
#6. Even her powders and face paint couldn't disguise the age lines and gripe lines that ran as deep as the railway tracks some said were bound to cross our mountain any day so.
Jane Yolen
#7. Childrens books change lives. Stories pour into the hearts of children and help make them what they become.
Jane Yolen
#8. The others are all common mouths chattering, empty heads like wooden whistles blowing common tunes.
Jane Yolen
#9. I believe that culture begins in the cradle ... To do without tales and stories and books is to lose humanity's past, is to have no star map for our future.
Jane Yolen
#10. For it began to occur to him that one way to become private was to respect another's privacy.
Jane Yolen
#11. We are all monsters" Hannah said. "Because we are letting it happen." She said it not as if she believed it but as she were to repeat something she had heard before.
Jane Yolen
#12. Folklore is the perfect second skin. From under its hide, we can see all the shimmering, shadowy uncertainties of the world.
Jane Yolen
#13. He wishes to be far away, either at sea or on the shore. In between, he realizes, is the most difficult of all places to be.
Jane Yolen
#14. I contend that good children's stories are always about the Getting of Wisdom. That's another way of saying, "Let your characters grow. Up." And good stories for adults are about the Holding of Wisdom. Another way of saying, "Recognize you are grown up.
Jane Yolen
#15. How often is the passing of one storm only a prelude to another.
Jane Yolen
#16. Read something of interest every day - something of interest to you, not to your teacher or your best friend or your minister/rabbi/priest. Comics count. So does poetry. So do editorials in your school newspaper. Or a biography of a rock star. Or an instructional manual. Or the Bible.
Jane Yolen
#17. You are a name, not a number. Never forget that name, whatever they tell you here. You will always be Chaya - life - to me.
Jane Yolen
#18. He knew he was not a brave man, but he had a great sense of drama. In some circumstances it could seem the same. Forcing
Jane Yolen
#19. All around me, grown-up voices called out, "Amen!" as if the word was a hall pass into Heaven.
Jane Yolen
#20. Their lips were too thin to ask forgiveness, and their minds too mean to understand love.
Jane Yolen
#21. Know, my son, that the enemy will always be with you. He will be in the shadow of your dreams and in your living flesh, for he is the other part of yourself.
Jane Yolen
#22. The hard bed, the stool beside it, the stark cross on the wall, each cast shadows. Only the man in the bed seemed shadowless. He was the stillest thing in the room.
Jane Yolen
#23. Not to know is bad, but not to wish to know is worse.
Jane Yolen
#24. I write to satisfy the story or poem or piece of fascinating research that speaks to me. To rub a sore, to resonate with joy, to answer a question no one else has satisfactorily answered for me.
Jane Yolen
#25. A book is a wonderful present. Though it may grow worn, it will never grow old.
Jane Yolen
#26. It's never perfect when I write it down the first time, or the second time, or the fifth time. But it always gets better as I go over it and over it.
Jane Yolen
#28. Myths are stories that explain a natural phenomenon. Before humans found scientific explanations for such things as the moon and the sun and rainbows, they tried to understand them by telling stories.
Jane Yolen
#29. My youngest son becomes an award-winning nature photographer, and I cannot resist writing poems to his pictures. My daughter loves to cook, though I do not. Yet together, we write a cookbook with fairy tales. And now a second.
Jane Yolen
#30. All around the castle, a briary hedge began to grow, with thorns as sharp as barbs.
Jane Yolen
#31. I do not know where I am going or what I will do when I get there. I know only that to put one foot in front of the other, moves me on, away from you to a place, where I do not want to be.
Jane Yolen
#32. A child who can love the oddities of a fantasy book cannot possibly be xenophobic as an adult. What is a different color, a different culture, a different tongue for a child who has already mastered Elvish, respected Puddleglums, or fallen under the spell of dark-skinned Ged?
Jane Yolen
#33. Get up from your desk and wander outside occasionally. To be a good writer one needs to be a good observer, and there isn't a lot to be observed at desk level.
Jane Yolen
#34. Storytelling is our oldest form of remembering the promises we have made to one another and to our various gods, and the promises given in return; it is a way of recording our human emotions and desires and taboos.
Jane Yolen
#35. My beloved husband goes through radiation, and a book of sonnets is my passionate response. And then after he dies, I write another book of poems as a farewell. The two keywords here are passion and joy. I simply have a passion for writing, and I do it with joy.
Jane Yolen
#37. Readers re-create any story to suit their own needs. They re-clothe the story in their own shirts. Put simply: just as we write the story we need to write, they read the story they need to read.
Jane Yolen
#38. Shit is another useful word. Also very common. For example, pleasantly surprised? You say 'No shit?' You think someone tells you tales, you scoff 'You're shitting me.' You find something you like very much, you exclaim 'That's good shit!
Jane Yolen
#39. Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.
Jane Yolen
#40. The thing I want to know is, if you tell your brain not to do stuff ... and it keeps doing it anyway, does that mean your mind has a mind of its own? And if it does, then who's in charge here, anyway?
Jane Yolen
#41. If you give up at the first rejection or the first bad review, you will never make it in publishing.
Jane Yolen
#42. Time may heal all wounds, but it does not erase the scars.
Jane Yolen
#43. Passover isn't about eating, Hannah," her mother began at last, sighing and pushing her fingers through her silver-streaked hair. "You could have fooled me," Hannah muttered.
Jane Yolen
#44. It seems like I've been writing since birth! I started writing poems before I got to school. I wrote the class musical in first grade - both words and music. It was about a bunch of vegetables who got together in a salad. I played the chief carrot!
Jane Yolen
#45. But wanting and getting are hard neighbors and bitter friends.
Jane Yolen
#46. I must fill myself with sorrow if I am to give you what you want.
Jane Yolen
#47. Write every day. You don't have to write about anything specific, but you should exercise your writing muscle constantly.
Jane Yolen
#48. I read everything aloud, novels as well as picture books. I believe the eye and ear are different listeners. So as writers, we have to please both.
Jane Yolen
#49. While I was in junior high, I wrote an entire essay in rhyme about manufacturing in New York State. In high school, I won a Scholastic poetry contest.
Jane Yolen
#50. I don't care whether the story is real or fantastical. I tell the story that needs to be told.
Jane Yolen
#51. Once upon a time," Gemma began, the older two girls whispering the opening with her, "which is all times and no times but not the very best of times,there was a castle. And in it lived a king who wanted nothing more in the world than a child.
Jane Yolen
#52. I began as a journalist for my pocketbook and a poet for my soul.
Jane Yolen
#53. It is the last thing we learn, / listening to the creature world ...
Jane Yolen
#54. Happy-ever-after is a fairy-tale notion, not history. I know of no woman who escaped from Chelmno alive.
Jane Yolen
#55. Language helps develp life as surely as it reflects life. It is a most important part of our human condition.
Jane Yolen
#56. I have pulled threads from magic tapestries already woven and used them to weave my own cloth.
Jane Yolen
#57. What is a vow ... but the mouth repeating what the heart has already promised?
Jane Yolen
#58. If there is a single person at the nexus of fantasy literature, it is Terri Windling
as editor, as writer, as painter, as muse.
Jane Yolen
#59. The thing about endings is, they can begin quietly enough. That's how they sneak up on you.
Jane Yolen
#60. There's only one absolute rule in writing: None of us gets it right the first time. Revise, reverse, reinvent, re-vision.
Jane Yolen
#61. You can only chase a butterfly for so long.
Jane Yolen
#62. And at twelve, heading for adulthood, a child fears that the way she is at that moment is all she's ever going to be.
Jane Yolen
#63. A good story is [a] kind of irritant. You read it, then you cannot stop thinking about it. Eventually, your mind and heart encyst about it, and what occurs is a pearl of the soul.
Jane Yolen
#64. Because though women lie when they have to and men lie all the time, the mirror always tells the truth.
Jane Yolen
#65. Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing, the rest will follow.
Jane Yolen
#66. Wanting to die and dying, she found were two separate things.
Jane Yolen
#67. A mist still lay all about the walls and floors, hovering like a last breath on the lips of all the sleepers. As he walked through the castle, he marveled at how many lay asleep: the good people, the not-so-good, the young people and the not-so-young, and not one of them stirring. Not one.
Jane Yolen
#68. Intuition works best when you remember that 'tuition' is part of it. You need to have paid ahead of time (i.e. Done your prep work ) so as to prepare the ground for intuition.
Jane Yolen
#69. If you want to write, you write. Talent is simply not enough.
Jane Yolen
#70. What makes a good book?
Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.
Jane Yolen
#71. Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.
Jane Yolen
#72. Why am I working so hard? Going for 400 books, perhaps, but who's really counting?
Jane Yolen
#73. You've got some power," Jakkin said. "One hug - and the lights go out!
Jane Yolen
#74. Papa wasn't like them, with lines like cursive writing up and down their faces.
Jane Yolen
#75. We all have such stories. It is a brutal arithmetic. But I - I am alive. You are alive. As long as we breathe, we can see and hear. As long as we can remember, all those gone before are alive inside us.
Jane Yolen
#76. Write, write, and write some more. Think of writing as a muscle that needs lots of exercise.
Jane Yolen
#77. Part of her revolted against the insanity of the rules. Part of her was grateful. In a world of chaos, any guidelines helped. And she knew that each day she remained alive, she remained alive. One plus one plus one. The Devil's arithmetic ...
Jane Yolen
#78. Fairy Tales always have a happy ending.' That depends ... on whether you are Rumpelstiltskin or the Queen.
Jane Yolen
#79. The tales of Elfland do not stand or fall on their actuality but on their truthfulness, their speaking to the human condition, the longings we all have for the Faerie Other.
Jane Yolen
#80. Don't ever write just for a trend or fad, because it's a moving target, and by the time you get your work out there, the trend or fad is gone. Dig deep; don't be afraid to write fiercely. Expose your heart.
Jane Yolen
#81. I think picture books should stretch children. I think they should be full of wonderful, amazing words.
Jane Yolen
#82. You know how it is: as soon as you decide to forget something, your brain comes to the conclusion that it's the most fascinating thing in the world.
Jane Yolen
#83. Aren't hidden doors the most alluring? The old stories point that out surely. Even the greatest heroes and heroines fall under the spell of a locked door.
Jane Yolen
#84. They [Fairy Tales] are talking about real emotions, telling true stories, through the medium of metaphor. People used to understand metaphor better than I think we do now. But these stories are so potent, they refuse to die.
Jane Yolen
#85. The main plot line is simple: Getting your character to the foot of the tree, getting him up the tree, and then figuring out how to get him down again.
Jane Yolen
#86. A shadowless man is a monster, a devil, a thing of evil. A man without a shadow is soulless. A shadow without a man is a pitiable shred. Yet together, light and dark, they make a whole.
Jane Yolen
#87. Growth in the ability to write comes in spurts.
Jane Yolen
#88. The magical story is not a microscope but a mirror, not a drop of water but a well. It is not simply one thing or two, but a multitude. It is at once both lucid and opaque, it accepts both dark and light, speaks to youth and old age.
Jane Yolen
#89. Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.
Jane Yolen
#90. If a parent wants to talk about slavery or wants to talk about countries where bombs go off, they need to have a way - a setting - to have that conversation. And there are wonderful books out there for those kinds of conversations.
Jane Yolen
#91. In college, I wrote newspaper articles and songs. Then, on my 21st birthday, I sold my first book. It was a nonfiction book about women pirates - 'Pirates in Petticoats.' After that, I was a book writer for good.
Jane Yolen
#92. Sometimes living takes more courage than dying.
Jane Yolen
#93. Fish are not the best authority on water.
Jane Yolen
#94. Stories," he'd said, his voice low and almost husky, "we are made up of stories. And even the one's that seem the most like lies can be our deepest hidden truths.
Jane Yolen
#95. Well,' the Goddess said, 'your heart didn't heal straight the last time it broke. So we'll break it again and reset it so it heals straight this time.
Jane Yolen
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