Top 90 Jane Yolen Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “As Mama once told me, “We called him Boy for the first two months of his life, but when his third-month birthday came around and we saw that sweet smile – especially when you were close to him, reaching out for him – we realized that he had chosen life. So we named him Chaim after your zaide, your grandfather, but also because ‘chaim’ in Hebrew means ‘life.’” I cannot imagine what my life would have been like without my twin.”

— Jane Yolen

52. “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

53. “A strong leader is considered a wrong leader when that leader is female.”

— Jane Yolen

54. “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

55. “If you want to write, you write. Talent is simply not enough.”

— Jane Yolen

56. “We’re lucky we don’t have to share. Lots of people have to – you told me so yourself.” “Share?” Gittel had looked appalled. Chaim remembered the face she’d made at the time, adding, “Papa, we have so little, how could we possibly share?” He’d looked at her, shook his head. “Many people have far less, and that you must never forget.”

— Jane Yolen

57. “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

58. “The salt smell of the ocean, sharp and steady, called to her from the window. Looking out, she saw her sisters, the waves, beckoning her with their white arms.”

— Jane Yolen

59. “Rising only to the edge of her waist – for she knew full well how the sight of a tail affects mortal men – the mermaid showed the prince her shell-like breasts, her pearly skin, the phosphorescence of her hair. She held a webbed hand over her mouth, her fingers as slim as the ribs of a fan. Then she pulled her hand away, displaying her smile. She was well trained in the arts of seduction, as was he. Royalty abounds in it.”

— Jane Yolen

60. “War is our backyard, famine our feast. Most fear the wind of our wings and even, in their hurt, pray for life. Only a few, a very few, truly pray for death. But we answer all their prayers with the same coin.”

— Jane Yolen

61. “And I say that to tell a prince to his face that you have dreamed of his doom invites the dreamer’s doom as well. And, as you yourself reminded me, it may not be all of the truth. The greatest wisdom of any dreamer is to survive in order to dream again. Besides, how do you really know if what you dream is true or if, in telling of it, you make it come true?”

— Jane Yolen

62. “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

63. “He was always being sent away from place to place for lying. The problem was, he never lied. He simply saw truth differently from other folk. On the slant.”

— Jane Yolen

64. “One day Ilka told me they were moving to America. Her papa, who was a professor, had found work there. “Is it far away?” I asked. “America?” We hadn’t studied geography yet. “Over the ocean,” she said. I’d never seen the ocean. I thought it was like the pond in the nearby park, only bigger. “I will visit,” I said. “I will write,” she said. The Nazis came. We did neither.”

— Jane Yolen

65. “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

66. “I tell the truth,′ she said. ‘But I tell it slant.”

— Jane Yolen

67. “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

68. “The Baba gives me paper, and a pen that sputters ink. Write, she says, tell the true Though you may have to lie to do it.”

— Jane Yolen

69. “I have pulled threads from magic tapestries already woven and used them to weave my own cloth.”

— Jane Yolen

70. “How can this be, this great magic, that makes real the unreal, the not-actual into a kind of factless fictual, turns lies into the True? Don’t ask me, for I am new at this work, new at telling my own truth. All I can start with is Once Upon A Time, that oldest and truest of lies.”

— Jane Yolen

71. “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

72. “Why would anyone want to be God?” he asked. “It’s a terrible occupation.”

— Jane Yolen

73. “Now you must close your eyes. Yes, that is it. Selinda, you, too. Good. Good. Bring in the dark that I may teach you to breathe. For it is breath that is behind words. And words that are the shapers of knowledge. And knowledge that is the base of understanding. And understanding, the link between sister and sister.” And.”

— Jane Yolen

74. “The minute they were in the hall, he whispered to his father, “He’s a pig.” “Not kosher,” Papa added, and they both chuckled.”

— Jane Yolen

75. “Welcome to Neverland,” Peter said, as if this were supposed to be a big surprise. Darla took her hand away from his. “It’s smaller than I thought it would be,” she said. This time she looked right at him.”

— Jane Yolen

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “The others are all common mouths chattering, empty heads like wooden whistles blowing common tunes.”

— Jane Yolen

80. “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

81. “Somewhere becomes a nightmare. I knock on no doors, make no phone calls. Nowhere becomes my destination. You can find it on the blank spaces of any free map in any old store. Just turn a corner of your mind, and it’s there.”

— Jane Yolen

82. “The only duty of the dreamer is to tell the truth about the dream.”

— Jane Yolen

83. “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

84. “All around me, grown-up voices called out, “Amen!” as if the word was a hall pass into Heaven.”

— Jane Yolen

85. “The storyteller in me asks: what if? And when I try to answer that, a story begins.”

— Jane Yolen

86. “We write not just to show off, not just to tell, or only to have written. We write to know ourselves.”

— Jane Yolen

87. “Fiction is like wrestling with angels-you do not expect to win, but you do expect to come away from the experience changed.”

— Jane Yolen

88. “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

89. “She’s gone on that long road into adulthood from which none of us returns.”

— Jane Yolen

90. “Wood may remain twenty years in the water, but it is still not a fish.”

— Jane Yolen

91. “I think of death, not as a smokestack, but as an opening door.”

— Jane Yolen

92. “The priestess gave the line of girls a smile, but there was no warmth in that smile, only a formal lifting of the lips.”

— Jane Yolen