Jane Yolen Quotes

To understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors, is to build our identities.

Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.

I come from a family of storytellers.

I grew up in a very cultural household, but part of our culture is that we don't really take photos.

We have a unique culture.

There are storytelling traditions that come from Africa that are unique from anywhere else.

Traditions insist upon themselves. Look around, and you will see them trying to exist everywhere, in everyone's life.

The earliest voice listened to by the nations in their infancy was the voice of the storyteller.

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.

We're dead as a species if we don't tell stories, because then we don't know who we are.

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?

There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.

Storytelling is the oldest form of education.

Storytelling was the most honored of all talents, for it benefited everyone.

I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as it was said to me.

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.

I'm not a woman! Let's make that very clear! Oh I don't know, maybe I am. I am an American woman. Or 65 percent of me is.

All the truth in the world is held in stories.

I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.

the ancient people perceived the world and themselves within that world as part of an ancient continuous story composed of innumerable bundles of other stories.

...belief has a second edge. If there are ten thousand medieval peasants who create vampires by believing them real, there may be one - probably a child - who will imagine the stake necessary to kill it. But a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the mallet which drives it home.

It was best to believe in all possibilities...there were more mysteries in the world than a man could ever hope to understand.

I think the world is always improving and always not improving. I think that both are simultaneously happening all the time. I don't think it's one motion unfortunately - I wish we could say it's better, better, better - but I think it's better, bad, better, bad - you know?

The world is full of contradiction.

Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)