Jane Yolen Quotes

There is a lot of contradictions of mermaids as a symbol. I'm always interested in contradictions.

I am large, I contain multitudes

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

That's the thing with 'Lost': you can put a spin on so many things.

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

All the things that I find beautiful have a darkness about them.

I have been writing fairy tales for as long as I can remember. Not much has changed in terms of my natural attraction to the narrative techniques of fairy tales. My appreciation of them in the traditional stories has deepened, especially of flat and unadorned language, intuitive logic, abstraction, and everyday magic.

I like to show the grey area in all my characters.

As a child, I loved fairy tales because the story, the what-comes-next, is paramount. As an adult, I'm fascinated by their logic and illogic.

Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be about everything.

People tend to think of fairy tales as 'archetypal.' They are also extremely sensual, something which translates well over the ages.

I don't think there are in life, pure darkness or pure light. Everyone's got a little of everything.

I like things that aren't superficially one thing or another.

We are, all of us, incoherent text, and just knowing that - knowing that no matter how much you say, 'I am this' and part of you is not that - means that you can say it.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

The thing about Wagner is we're always wrong about him, because he always embraces opposites. There are things in his operas which viewed one way are naturalistic, and viewed another way are symbolic, but the problem is you can't represent both views on stage at once.

The Cube is, at the same time, a symbol of simplicity and complexity.

A short story can be really interesting and enriching and powerful, but a novel just contains so much more information and richness and depth. That's what I strive for in my music. I want to create something that's like a longform statement.

A properly balanced story provides an equal representation of the negative and positive attributes of, I could say the world, but it's actually a being. 'Harry Potter''s a good example. So Harry's the hero, right. But he's tainted with evil. There's a dark and a light in every bit of that narrative. It's well balanced.

There's light and dark in all things, you know?

You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?

If there is one word that makes creative people different from others, it is the word complexity. Instead of being an individual, they are a multitude. Like the color white that includes all colors, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves. Creativity allows for paradox, light, shadow, inconsistency, even chaos -and creative people experience both extremes with equal intensity.

Everything is a little bit of darkness, even the light.

A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves.