Jane Yolen > Quotes

“Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.”
― Jane Yolen, Touch Magic

“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, The Books of Great Alta: Comprising 'Sister Light, Sister Dark' and 'White Jenna'

“Fairy Tales always have a happy ending.' That depends... on whether you are Rumpelstiltskin or the Queen.”
― Jane Yolen, Briar Rose

“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 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, Touch Magic

“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, Touch Magic

“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, Armageddon Summer

“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, The Devil's Arithmetic

“Time may heal all wounds, but it does not erase the scars.”
― Jane Yolen, Briar Rose

“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!'
-Baba Yaga”
― Jane Yolen, Except the Queen

“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, Briar Rose

“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, The Devil's Arithmetic

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

“Touch magic. Pass it on.”
― Jane Yolen, Touch Magic

“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

“Language helps develp life as surely as it reflects life. It is a most important part of our human condition.”
― Jane Yolen, Touch Magic

“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, Touch Magic

“How often is the passing of one storm only a prelude to another.”
― Jane Yolen, Queen's Own Fool

“What is a vow...but the mouth repeating what the heart has already promised?”
― Jane Yolen, Sister Light, Sister Dark

“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

“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, Touch Magic

“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

“1. Write every day
2. Write what interests you.
3. Write for the child inside of you. (Or the adult, if you are writing adult books.)
4. Write with honest emotion
5. Be careful of being facile
6. Be wary of preaching
7. Be prepared for serendipity

Finally I would remind you of something that Churchill told a group of school boys: "Never give up. Never give up. Never, never, never give up.”
― Jane Yolen

“If you love a waist, you waste a love.”
― Jane Yolen

“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, Snow in Summer: The Tale of an American Snow White

“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

“Cinderella, until lately, has never been a passive dreamer waiting for rescue. The forerunners of the Ash-girl have all been hardy, active heroines who take their lives into their own hands and work out their own salvations ....
Cinderella speaks to all of us in whatever skin we inhabit: the child mistreated, a princess or highborn lady in disguise bearing her trials with patience, fortitude, and determination. Cinderella makes intelligent decisions, for she knows that wishing solves nothing without concomitant action. We have each been that child. (Even boys and men share thatdream, as evidenced by the many Ash-boy variants.) It is the longing of any youngster sent supperless to bed or given less than a full share at Christmas. And of course it is the adolescent dream.
To make Cinderella less than she is, an ill-treated but passive princess awaiting her rescue, cheapens our most cherished dreams and makes a mockery of the magic inside us all—the ability to change our own lives, the ability to
control our own destinies. [The Walt Disney film] set a new pattern for Cinderella: a helpless, hapless, pitiable, useless heroine who has to be saved time and time again by the talking mice and birds because she is “off in a world of dreams.” It is a Cinderella who is not recognized by her prince until she is magically back in her ball gown, beribboned and bejewelled. Poor Cinderella. Poor us.”
― Jane Yolen, Once Upon a Time

“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, Briar Rose

“In fiction, the characters have their own lives. They may start as a gloss on the author’s life, but they move on from there. In poetry, especially confessional poetry but in other poetry as well, the poet is not writing characters so much as emotional truth wrapped in metaphor. Bam! Pow! A shot to the gut.”
― 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, The Devil's Arithmetic

“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

“I'm away with the faeries until Tuesday,
A-floating like white clouds above the trees.
We will thread a careful dance through mushroom circles
And catch a ride on every passing breeze.

On Saturday, you'll find us by the river
Tickling the trout with golden stems.
Sunday we will tiptoe on the poppies,
Monday we will dig up acorn gems.

But Tuesday I'll be home in time for dinner.
I'll have some journey cake still in my pack.
Tuesday I'll have had enough of fairies
And really very happy to be back.”
― Jane Yolen

“Wanting to die and dying, she found were two separate things.”
― Jane Yolen, Am I Blue?: Coming Out from the Silence

“You've got some power," Jakkin said. "One hug -- and the lights go out!”
― Jane Yolen, A Sending of Dragons

“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, The Devil's Arithmetic

“...For it began to occur to him that one way to become private was to respect another's privacy.”
― Jane Yolen, A Sending of Dragons

“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

“JANE: What to do when it is that time in your girl child's life:

1. Sit down calmly and explain sex to her?

2. Buy her a book, video, or CD that gies her the details?

3. Buy her condoms and put her on the pill?

Or do as many mothers before you did - just stick your head in the sand and hope she joins a convent.

Of course these days your child may know more about sex than you did at her age, what with in-school health lessons, and out-of-school R-rated movies easily accessed on the TV, not to mention the Starr Report!

In the days of fairy tales, sex was dangerous because so many women died in childbirth. Today sex is again dangerous because of diseases like AIDS. So what do we say?”
― Jane Yolen, Mirror, Mirror: Forty Folk Tales for Mothers and Daughters to Share