Tillie Olsen Quotes

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

Tillie Olsen

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

Tillie Olsen

#3. The world was full of signs. One needed only to know how to see and interpret them.

Jan-Philipp Sendker

#4. Every woman who writes is a survivor.

Tillie Olsen

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

Tillie Olsen

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

Tillie Olsen

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

Tillie Olsen

#8. 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.

Tillie Olsen

#9. Better immersion than to live untouched.

Tillie Olsen

#10. 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?

Tillie Olsen

#11. Tillie Olsen. James Joyce. Robert Stone. I must have read Updike's Rabbit, Run five times and Bellow's Herzog

Pamela Paul

#12. Have the discipline to listen to and to trust your instincts.

A.D. Posey

#13. I think that it is important to be gregarious, and that friendships are not just a leisure pursuit, that they are an integral part of what it is to be human, and one does better work if one has a circle of friends that is active.

Niall Ferguson

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

Tillie Olsen

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

Tillie Olsen

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

Tillie Olsen

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

Tillie Olsen

#18. The past does not exist unless you carry the remains of it with you.

Alanna Zabel

#19. Be honest with God and ask Him to give you a willingness to do the work of prayer.

David Jeremiah

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

Tillie Olsen

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

Tillie Olsen

#22. Who cares what time you wake up and go to bed? What matters most is what you do with your life in between.

J.R. Rim

#23. 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.

Tillie Olsen

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

Tillie Olsen

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

Tillie Olsen

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

Tillie Olsen

#27. The Best of Elvis Presley, Doris Day, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Hailey and the Comets, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Frankie Laine all topped the charts in the '50s. Load a playlist of rock n' roll royalty. You're spoilt for choice.

Sara Sheridan

#28. 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

#29. Humor has always been the redemptive angel in the Conroys's sad history. With this family, I shall never grow hungry from lack of material.

Pat Conroy