Tillie Olsen Quotes

Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.

That's what I want to be when I grow up, just a peaceful wreck holding hands with other peaceful wrecks.

The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years - responses to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters - stay with you, mark you, become you. The cost of discontinuity (that pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what should take weeks take me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.

Women have the right to say: this is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.

More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, and responsible

The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.

She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others.

Better immersion than to live untouched.

It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion than to live untouched.

And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?

Compared to men writers of like distinction and years of life, few women writers have had lives of unbroken productivity, or leave behind a 'body of work.' Early beginnings, then silence; or clogged late ones (foreground silences); long periods between books (hidden silences); characterize most of us.

Not to have an audience is a kind of death.

It's hard for me to talk about the terrible things that have happened in my lifetime because they didn't need to be.

It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil.

Every woman who writes is a survivor.

Think about all that we've lost that has been said orally because nobody was taking it down. I feel very fortunate to live in a time where we have so many different voices. We have a much richer literature than we've ever had, and we can know America so much better.

Literature is a place for generosity and affection and hunger for equals - not a prizefight ring. We are increased, confirmed in our medium, roused to do our best, by every good writer, every fine achievement. Would we want one good writer or fine book less? The sense of writers being pitted against each other is bred primarily by the workings of the commercial marketplace, and by critics lauding one writer at the expense of another while ignoring the existence of nearly all.

I don't want to die leaving the world as it is right now.

Time granted does not necessarily coincide with time that can be most fully used.

I very much dislike the word "race," and I never use it. I use the word "racist." Race is not a fact. There is only one race: human. Skin color is less than 2 percent of the DNA.

Not everybody feels religion the same way. Some it's in their mouth, but some it's like a hope in their blood, their bones.

There are worse words than cuss-words, there are words that hurt.

The fact that human beings do not put up forever with misery, humiliation, degradation, actual physical deprivation but act is a fact which every human being should know about. We are a species that makes changes.

I know that I haven’t powers enough to divide myself into one who earns and one who creates.

Better mankind born without mouths and stomachs than always to worry about money to buy, to shop, to fix, to cook, to wash, to clean.

Lighting does occasionally strike and occasional the result isn't a corpse.

I could not live by literature if only to begin with, because of the slow maturing of my work and its special character.

Writers in a profit making economy are an exploitable commodity whose works are products to be marketed, and are so judged and handled.