Yolen Quotes & Sayings

You write to be read. That is the bottom line. — Jane Yolen

Growth in the ability to write comes in spurts. — Jane Yolen

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

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

The thing about endings is, they can begin quietly enough. That's how they sneak up on you. — Jane Yolen

You may adore Love You Forever, but I hear it as a story about an overbearing and smothering mother who infantilizes her son and can only tell him she loves him when he is fast asleep. I also contend that she drugs his cocoa. And that when the man's baby daughter wakes up sixteen years later and finds him fondling her in her room, she will be calling 911 and going into therapy. — 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

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

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

What was can never be again. — Jane Yolen

I must fill myself with sorrow if I am to give you what you want. — Jane Yolen

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

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

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

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

I have pulled threads from magic tapestries already woven and used them to weave my own cloth. — Jane Yolen

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

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

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

I have always been jealous of artists. The smell of the studio, the names of the various tools, the look of a half-finished canvas all shout of creation. What do writers have in comparison? Only the flat paper, the clacketing of the typewriter or the scrape of a pen across a yellow page. And then, when the finished piece is presented, there is a small wonder on one hand, a manuscript smudged with erasures or crossed out lines on the other. The impact of the painting is immediate, the manuscript must unfold slowly through time. — Jane Yolen

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

Sometimes living takes more courage than dying. — Jane Yolen

Happy-ever-after is a fairy-tale notion, not history. I know of no woman who escaped from Chelmno alive. — Jane Yolen

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

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

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

He unpacks his bag of tales
with fingers quick
as a weaver's
picking the weft threads
threading the warp.
Watch his fingers.
Watch his lips
speaking the old familiar words:

"Once there was
and there was not,
oh, best beloved,
when the world was filled with wishes
the way the sea is filled with fishes..."

All those threads
pulling us back
to another world, another time,
when goosegirls married well
and frogs could rhyme,
when maids spoke syllables of pearl
and stepmothers came to grief.

.... (from The Storyteller poem) — Jane Yolen

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

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

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

But wanting and getting are hard neighbors and bitter friends. — 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

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

Wanting to die and dying, she found were two separate things. — Jane Yolen

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

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

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

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

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

Ah - now you think I have been lying to you, that this is only a story. It has a king in it. And while a story with Death might be true, a story with a king in it is always a fairy tale. But remember, this comes from a time when kings were as common as corn. Plant a field and you got corn. Plant a kingdom and you got a king. It is that simple. — Jane Yolen

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

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

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

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

Fish are not the best authority on water. — Jane Yolen

If you give up at the first rejection or the first bad review, you will never make it in publishing. — Jane Yolen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not to know is bad, but not to wish to know is worse. — Jane Yolen

Come, Ye Women: Oh, come, ye women of the Isles, And listen to my song, For if ye be but thirteen years, Ye've not been women long. And if ye be threescore and ten, No longer women be, Or so say all the merry men Who count so cruel-ly. But women we be from our birth, And will be till we die. Our counte is made so differently To give the men that lie. Oh, come, ye women of the Isles, And listen to my song, For we be women all through life, Where life and love are long. — 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

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

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

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

For it began to occur to him that one way to become private was to respect another's privacy. — Jane Yolen

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

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

All writers write about themselves, just as the old storytellers chose to tell stories that spoke to and about themselves. They call it the world, but it is themselves they portray. The world of which they write is like a mirror that reflects the inside of their hearts, often more truly than they know. — Jane Yolen

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

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

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

[W]hen the modern mythmaker, the writer of literary fairy tales, dares to touch the old magic and try to make it work in new ways, it must be done with the surest of touches. It is, perhaps, a kind of artistic thievery, this stealing of old characters, settings, the accoutrements of magic. But then, in a sense, there is an element of theft in all art; even the most imaginative artist borrows and reconstructs the archetypes when delving into the human heart. That is not to say that using a familiar character from folklore in the hopes of shoring up a weak narrative will work. That makes little sense. Unless the image, character, or situation borrowed speaks to the author's condition, as cryptically and oracularly as a dream, folklore is best left untapped. — Jane Yolen

I began as a journalist for my pocketbook and a poet for my soul. — Jane Yolen

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

Snow-melt in the stream: Mama Nature turning winter's storms into nourishment for the soil, fecundity, and beauty. This is what I must now learn to do with the stormy weather I've been passing through: turn it into beauty, turn it into art, so new life can germinate and bloom.
One example of a creative artist who does this is my friend Jane Yolen, who wrote her exquisite book of poems The Radiation Sonnets while her husband was undergoing treatment for the cancer that would eventually claim his life. This is what all artists must do: take whatever life gives us and "alchemize" it into our art (either directly and autobiographically, as in Jane's book, or indirectly; whatever approach works best), turning darkness into light, spinning straw into gold, transforming pain and hardship into what J.R.R. Tolkien called 'a miraculous grace. — Terri Windling

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

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

Papa wasn't like them, with lines like cursive writing up and down their faces. — Jane Yolen

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

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

It is winter now,
and the roses are blooming again,
their petals bright against the snow.
My father died last April;
my sisters no longer write,
except at the turning of the year,
content with their fine houses
and their grandchildren.
Beast and I
putter in the gardens
and walk slowly on the forest paths.
[from the poem, Beauty and the Beast: An Anniversary] — Jane Yolen

If you love a waist, you waste a love. — Jane Yolen

All around me, grown-up voices called out, "Amen!" as if the word was a hall pass into Heaven. — Jane Yolen

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

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

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

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

From Taking Your Clothes to the Salvation Army:
Okay, so strangers will be grateful for this, will wear the socks to keep their feet warm, blow their noses in your handkerchiefs, pull up the shorts, tuck in the size large shirts (too small for our boys, too big for our daughter), and bits of you will be out there, engaging in a life you no longer have. — Jane Yolen

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

Write every day. You don't have to write about anything specific, but you should exercise your writing muscle constantly. — Jane Yolen

Do not expect too much from your child and she will grow in your love ... But if you push her too much, you will push her away. A child is not yours to own but to raise. She may not be what you will have her to be, but she will be what she has to be. Remember what they say, that 'Wood may remain twenty years in the water, but it is still not a fish. — Jane Yolen

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

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

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

I don't care whether the story is real or fantastical. I tell the story that needs to be told. — Jane Yolen

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

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

When you realize my best selling books are 'Owl Moon,' the 'How Do Dinosaur' books, and 'Devil's Arithmetic,' how can the public make sense of that! I have fans who think I only write picture books or only write SF and fantasy. I have fanatics of my poetry and are stunned to find out I write prose, too! — Jane Yolen

The others are all common mouths chattering, empty heads like wooden whistles blowing common tunes. — Jane Yolen

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

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