Jane Yolen Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.”
-- Jane Yolen -
“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 -
“A book is a wonderful present. Though it may grow worn, it will never grow old.”
-- Jane Yolen -
“Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing... the rest will follow.”
-- Jane Yolen -
“Childrens books change lives. Stories pour into the hearts of children and help make them what they become.”
-- Jane Yolen -
“Language helps develp life as surely as it reflects life. It is a most important part of our human condition.”
-- Jane Yolen -
“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 -
“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 -
“How often is the passing of one storm only a prelude to another.”
-- Jane Yolen -
“A mist. A great mist. It covered the entire kingdom. And everyone in it - the good people and the not so good, the young people and the not-so-young, and even Briar Rose's mother and father fell asleep. Everyone slept: lords and ladies, teacher and tummlers, dogs and doves, rabbits and rabbitzen and all kinds of citizens. So fast asleep they were, they were not able to wake up for a hundred years.”
-- Jane Yolen -
“What is a vow... but the mouth repeating what the heart has already promised?”
-- Jane Yolen -
“Time may heal all wounds, but it does not erase the scars.”
-- Jane Yolen -
“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 -
“Growth in the ability to write comes in spurts.”
-- Jane Yolen -
“Wood may remain twenty years in the water, but it is still not a fish.”
-- Jane Yolen -
“Folklore is the perfect second skin. From under its hide, we can see all the shimmering, shadowy uncertainties of the world.”
-- Jane Yolen -
“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 -
“Fairy Tales always have a happy ending.' That depends... on whether you are Rumpelstiltskin or the Queen.”
-- Jane Yolen -
“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 -
“And for adults, the world of fantasy books returns to us the great words of power which, in order to be tamed, we have excised from our adult vocabularies. These words are the ***** of innocence, words which adults no longer use with other adults, and so we laugh at them and consign them to the nursery, fear masking as cynicism. These are the words that were forged in the earth, air, fire, and water of human existence, and the words are: Love. Hate. Good. Evil. Courage. Honor. Truth.”
-- Jane Yolen -
“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 -
“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 -
“Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.”
-- Jane Yolen -
“Just write. If you have to make a choice, if you say, 'Oh well, I'm going to put the writing away until my children are grown,' then you don't really want to be a writer. If you want to be a writer, you do your writing... If you don't do it, you probably don't want to be a writer, you just want to have written and be famous—which is very different.”
-- Jane Yolen -
“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 -
“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 -
“But as the scissors snip-snapped through her hair and the razor shaved the rest, she realized with a sudden awful panic that she could no longer recall anything from the past. I cannot remember, she whispered to herself. I cannot remember. She's been shorn of memory as brutally as she'd been shorn of her hair, without permission, without reason... Gone, all gone, she thought again wildly, no longer even sure what was gone, what she was mourning.”
-- Jane Yolen
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