Jane Yolen Quotes
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If you want to write, you write. Talent is simply not enough.
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Exercise the writing muscle every day.
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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.
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It is the last thing we learn, / listening to the creature world.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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A book is a wonderful present. Though it may grow worn, it will never grow old.
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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.
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Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing... the rest will follow.
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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.
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Fish are not the best authority on water.
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Sometimes living takes more courage than dying.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Growth in the ability to write comes in spurts.
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Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.
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You are a name, not a number. Never forget that name, whatever they tell you here. You will always be Chaya—life—to me.
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Wood may remain twenty years in the water, but it is still not a fish.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You write to be read. That is the bottom line.
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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.
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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.
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Language helps develp life as surely as it reflects life. It is a most important part of our human condition.
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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.
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