Jane Yolen Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

You can only chase a butterfly for so long.

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

Touch magic. Pass it on.