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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.

Jane Yolen

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Jane Yolen
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: February 11
Editor
Novelist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Jane Hyatt Yolen
Jane Hyatt Yolen Stemple
Jane H. Yolen Stemple
Makes
Scholars
Book
Scholar
Heart
Decades
Good
Critics
Time
Touch
Like
Question
Head
Books
Debating

More quotes by Jane Yolen

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Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.
Jane Yolen
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Sometimes living takes more courage than dying.
Jane Yolen
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Aren't hidden doors the most alluring? The old stories point that out surely. Even the greatest heroes and heroines fall under the spell of a locked door.
Jane Yolen
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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
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A child who can love the oddities of a fantasy book cannot possibly be xenophobic as an adult. What is a different color, a different culture, a different tongue for a child who has already mastered Elvish, respected Puddleglums, or fallen under the spell of dark-skinned Ged?
Jane Yolen
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Language helps develp life as surely as it reflects life. It is a most important part of our human condition.
Jane Yolen
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They [Fairy Tales] are talking about real emotions, telling true stories, through the medium of metaphor. People used to understand metaphor better than I think we do now. But these stories are so potent, they refuse to die.
Jane Yolen
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If you want to write, you write. Talent is simply not enough.
Jane Yolen
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Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing... the rest will follow.
Jane Yolen
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If you love a waist, you waste a love.
Jane Yolen
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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
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A shadowless man is a monster, a devil, a thing of evil. A man without a shadow is soulless. A shadow without a man is a pitiable shred. Yet together, light and dark, they make a whole.
Jane Yolen
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Touch magic. Pass it on.
Jane Yolen
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You are a name, not a number. Never forget that name, whatever they tell you here. You will always be Chaya—life—to me.
Jane Yolen
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Well,' the Goddess said, 'your heart didn't heal straight the last time it broke. So we'll break it again and reset it so it heals straight this time.
Jane Yolen
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I believe that culture begins in the cradle . . .To do without tales and stories and books is to lose humanity's past, is to have no star map for our future.
Jane Yolen
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Childrens books change lives. Stories pour into the hearts of children and help make them what they become.
Jane Yolen
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Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.
Jane Yolen
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It's never perfect when I write it down the first time, or the second time, or the fifth time. But it always gets better as I go over it and over it.
Jane Yolen
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Wood may remain twenty years in the water, but it is still not a fish.
Jane Yolen