Tillie Olsen Quotes & Sayings

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

#2. Not to have an audience is a kind of death.

#3. Every woman who writes is a survivor.

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

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

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

#7. 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.

#8. Better immersion than to live untouched.

#9. It is a long Baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion and in pain than to live untouched. Yet how will you sustain?

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

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

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

#13. What in me demanded that goodness in her? And what was the cost, the cost to her of such goodness?

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

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

#16. 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.

#17. Be critical. Women have the right to say: This is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.

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

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

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

Tillie Olsen Quotes