Quotes from Jane Yolen

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.

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.

Happy-ever-after is a fairy-tale notion, not history. I know of no woman who escaped from Chelmno alive.

Once upon a time, Gemma began, the older two girls whispering the opening with her, which is all times and no times but not the very best of times,there was a castle. And in it lived a king who wanted nothing more in the world than a child.

But wanting and getting are hard neighbors and bitter friends.

You think you know this story. You do not.

I must fill myself with sorrow if I am to give you what you want.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Papa wasn't like them, with lines like cursive writing up and down their faces.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

If there is a single person at the nexus of fantasy literature, it is Terri Windling -- as editor, as writer, as painter, as muse.

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.

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.

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.