Top 90 Jane Yolen Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Jane Yolen

2. “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

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

— Jane Yolen

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

— Jane Yolen

5. “Sometimes living takes more courage than dying.”

— Jane Yolen

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

— Jane Yolen

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

— Jane Yolen

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

— Jane Yolen

9. “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

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

— Jane Yolen

11. “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

12. “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

13. “A man whose axe was missing suspected his neighbor’s son. The boy walked like a thief, looked like a thief, and spoke like a thief. But the man found his axe while he was digging in the valley, and the next time he saw his neighbor’s son, the boy walked, looked, and spoke like any other child.”

— Jane Yolen

14. “Touch magic. Pass it on.”

— Jane Yolen

15. “If you love a waist, you waste a love.”

— Jane Yolen

16. “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

17. “You write to be read. That is the bottom line.”

— Jane Yolen

18. “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.”

— Jane Yolen

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

— Jane Yolen

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “You can only chase a butterfly for so long.”

— Jane Yolen

24. “Exercise the writing muscle every day.”

— Jane Yolen

25. “Live,” he whispered. “For my Chaya. For all our Chayas. Live. And remember.”

— Jane Yolen

26. “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

27. “Like the piano player, I have memory in my fingertips. I watch words spill out creating worlds, inventing colors, bridging generations.”

— Jane Yolen

28. “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

29. “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

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

— Jane Yolen

31. “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

32. “After a while, the story becomes the truth because no one actually remembers how things really happened.”

— Jane Yolen

33. “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. There will be times when he will surround you with walls of darkness. But remember always that your soul is secure to you, for your soul is entire, and that he cannot enter your soul, for your soul is part of God.”

— Jane Yolen

34. “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

35. “People were dying around us, of starvation, tuberculosis, cholera, typhus, typhoid, deportation, influenza, heartbreak. Their lungs were filling up because of the cold. They were being shot for walking too quickly, staring too hard, not answering questions fast enough or answering too fast, or just because they wore the yellow star. To die was easy. To live was harder. Papa said to us, “We have chosen the more difficult path, that of life. Now we must walk it.” We walked.”

— Jane Yolen

36. “Fish are not the best authority on water.”

— Jane Yolen

37. “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

38. “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

39. “Could it be that humans had an infinite capacity to make themselves at home in the direst of situations? Or did one just adjust expectations downward, so as to be able to get through each day?”

— Jane Yolen

40. “If we do not laugh, we will cry. Crying will only make us hotter and sweatier. We Jews like to joke about death because what you laugh at and make familiar can no longer frighten you. Besides, Chayaleh, what else is there to do?”

— Jane Yolen

41. “Laughter in the face of certain death? It is the very definition of the Hero,” said the White Queen. “The Jabberwock knew it and therefore could no longer move against you.”

— Jane Yolen

42. “Stories retold are stories remade.”

— Jane Yolen

43. “You’ve got some power,” Jakkin said. “One hug – and the lights go out!”

— Jane Yolen

44. “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

45. “Not to know is bad, but not to wish to know is worse.”

— Jane Yolen

46. “Once we have accepted the story, we cannot escape the story’s fate.”

— Jane Yolen

47. “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

48. “I contend that good children’s stories are always about the Getting of Wisdom. That’s another way of saying, “Let your characters grow. Up.” And good stories for adults are about the Holding of Wisdom. Another way of saying, “Recognize you are grown up.”

— Jane Yolen

49. “She left two mermaid tears, crystals with a bit of salt embedded in them, on his pillow.”

— Jane Yolen

50. “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