Quotes from Jane Yolen

If you love a waist, you waste a love.

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.

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.

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

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

Myths are stories that explain a natural phenomenon. Before humans found scientific explanations for such things as the moon and the sun and rainbows, they tried to understand them by telling stories.

The best of the old stories spoke to the listener because they spoke not just to the ears but to the heart as well.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

What was can never be again.

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.

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.

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

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.

All around the castle, a briary hedge began to grow, with thorns as sharp as barbs.

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

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

If you love a waist, you waste a love.

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.

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