Jane Yolen Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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

  Long, Gone, Stories

  7 Copy quote

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

  Jane Yolen

  Heart, Mouths, Vow

  5 Copy quote

• 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 pornography 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

  Hate, Book, Fire

  4 Copy quote

• Growth in the ability to write comes in spurts.

  Jane Yolen

  Writing, Growth, Ability

  4 Copy quote

• In fantasy stories we learn to understand the differences of others, we learn compassion for those things we cannot fathom, we learn the importance of keeping our sense of wonder. The strange worlds that exist in the pages of fantastic literature teach us a tolerance of other people and places and engender an openness toward new experience. Fantasy puts the world into perspective in a way that 'realistic' literature rarely does. It is not so much an escape from the here-and-now as an expansion of each reader's horizons.

  Jane Yolen

  Compassion, New Experiences, Differences

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jane Yolen

  Writing, Lines, Bottom

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Dark, Men, Light

  Jane Yolen (1981). “Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie and Folklore in the Literature of Childhood”, Philomel

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Writing, Choices

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Needs, Stories

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Brain, World, Forget

  7 Copy quote

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

  Jane Yolen

  Often Is, Storm, Prelude

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Book, Dark

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Mother, Teacher, Dog

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Thinking, Talking

  4 Copy quote

• If you love a waist, you waste a love.

  Jane Yolen

  Waste, Ifs

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Memories, Past, Hair

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Mean, Brain, Mind

  7 Copy quote

• You can only chase a butterfly for so long.

  Jane Yolen

  Butterfly, Chasing Butterflies, Long

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Fall, Longing, Tales

  Jane Yolen (1981). “Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie and Folklore in the Literature of Childhood”, Philomel

  7 Copy quote

• Fish are not the best authority on water.

  Jane Yolen

  Ignorance, Water, Unawareness

  Jane Yolen (2016). “White Jenna”, p.178, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Memories, Numbers, People

  Jane Yolen (1990). “The Devil's Arithmetic”, p.100, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

• Sometimes living takes more courage than dying.

  Jane Yolen

  Dying, Sometimes

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jane Yolen

  Queens, Fairy Tale, Happy Endings

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jane Yolen

  Listening, World, Lasts

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jane Yolen

  Perfect, Skins, World

  4 Copy quote

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