Jane Yolen Quotes

Time may heal all wounds, but it does not erase the scars.

Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.

A book is a wonderful present. Though it may grow worn, it will never grow old.

Childrens books change lives. Stories pour into the hearts of children and help make them what they become.

Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing... the rest will follow.

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.

Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.

Ideas are the cheapest part of the writing. They are free. The hard part is what you do with ideas you've gathered.

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.

Language helps develp life as surely as it reflects life. It is a most important part of our human condition.

If you want to write, you write. Talent is simply not enough.

Exercise the writing muscle every day.

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.

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.

Touch magic. Pass it on.

You can only chase a butterfly for so long.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Write, write, and write some more. Think of writing as a muscle that needs lots of exercise.

What is a vow... but the mouth repeating what the heart has already promised?

Fairy Tales always have a happy ending.' That depends... on whether you are Rumpelstiltskin or the Queen.

Sometimes living takes more courage than dying.

Growth in the ability to write comes in spurts.

Fish are not the best authority on water.

You write to be read. That is the bottom line.

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.

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.

You are a name, not a number. Never forget that name, whatever they tell you here. You will always be Chaya—life—to me.

It is the last thing we learn, / listening to the creature world.

Folklore is the perfect second skin. From under its hide, we can see all the shimmering, shadowy uncertainties of the world.

If you love a waist, you waste a love.

Intuition works best when you remember that “tuition” is part of it. You need to have paid ahead of time (ie done your prep work) so as to prepare the ground for intuition.

How often is the passing of one storm only a prelude to another.

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.

Wood may remain twenty years in the water, but it is still not a fish.

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.

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.

Because though women lie when they have to and men lie all the time, the mirror always tells the truth.

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.

Their lips were too thin to ask forgiveness, and their minds too mean to understand love.

We write not just to show off, not just to tell, or only to have written. We write to know ourselves.

You've got some power, " Jakkin said. "One hug—and the lights go out!

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.

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.