Quotes from Jane Yolen

to eat away that hope. "Belief," Mama often said, "is the first thing to come, and the last thing to go." "Belief," Papa always countered, "is for children.

Do not touch her!

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.

I learned to write poetry, telling the truth through metaphor, simile, straight-forward lies.

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

And the deep thrumming of the forest that too many people mistake for silence.

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.

She's gone on that long road into adulthood from which none of us returns.

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.

You can fill no bag with regrets.

You want to tell this story, perhaps now you will.

Fairy tales always have a happy ending. He leaned back in his chair. "That depends." "On what?" "On whether you are Rumplestiltskin or the Queen.

Sometimes living takes more courage than dying

Hans was never good at giving proper answers. He always had different answers in his head, odd answers, answers that his teachers and his parents and his grandmother and even his crazy grandfather seemed to think were wrong. But they weren't wrong answers, they were just his answers. He wondered suddenly what the Ice Maiden would do if he gave her a wrong answer. And, thinking this, he found he couldn't open his mouth at all.

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.

Truly, we'll be wolves no longer, but as the tinker said once along ago, we'll survive like the foxes, their children.

A strong leader is considered a wrong leader when that leader is female.

I tell the truth,' she said. 'But I tell it slant.

One night she dreamed and knew she was dreaming. She was lying on her back in a coffin, her limbs cold and very heavy. Gentle hands laid her there; a gentle voice whispered a promise. "Soon you shall be my companion and my helper," said the voice. "Flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin.

Intuition works best when you remember that "tuition" is part of it. You need to have paid ahead of time (ie done your prep work) so as to prepare the ground for intuition.

I think picture books should stretch children. I think they should be full of wonderful, amazing words.

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

It seems like I've been writing since birth! I started writing poems before I got to school. I wrote the class musical in first grade - both words and music. It was about a bunch of vegetables who got together in a salad. I played the chief carrot!

When you realize my best selling books are 'Owl Moon,' the 'How Do Dinosaur' books, and 'Devil's Arithmetic,' how can the public make sense of that! I have fans who think I only write picture books or only write SF and fantasy. I have fanatics of my poetry and are stunned to find out I write prose, too!