29 Tillie Olsen Quotes on Tell Me a Riddle, Silence and Yonnondio: From the Thirties - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous Tillie Olsen quotes. There are more than 29 quotes in our Tillie Olsen quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning Tillie Olsen wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like Tell Me a Riddle, Silence and Yonnondio: From the Thirties

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

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.

Never saw so many peaceful wrecks in my life... That’s what I want to be when I grow up, just a peaceful wreck holding hands with other peaceful wrecks.

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

Not to have an audience is a kind of death.

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.

Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom – but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every woman who writes is a survivor.

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.

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

Mazie sits with a sense of non-being over her – of it being someone other than she sitting there timeless, suspended in a dusky room, feeling a voice gathering around her, kind still hands of sound flaring into words meaningless and strange, meaningless when one tries to understand, but meaningful for a fleeting second.

Yonnondio: From the Thirties Quotes

An old man, Elias Caldwell, death already smothering his breast, tries to tell a child something of all he has learned, something of what he would have her live by – and hears only incoherent words come out. Yet the thoughts revolve, revolve and whirl, a scorching nebula in his breast, sending forth flaming suns that only shatter against the walls and return to chaos. How can it be said? Once I lived in softness and ease and sickened. Once I chose a stern life, turning to people hard, bitter and strong – obscure people, the smell of soil and sweat about them – the smell of life…But I failed. I brought them nothing. To die, how bitter when nothing was done with my life. And the nebula whirls and revolves, sending its scorching suns that break in a chaos of inarticulateness about this child with a sound of fear. Nothing of it said.

Yonnondio: From the Thirties Quotes

And could you not make a cameo of this and pin it onto your aesthetic hearts?

Yonnondio: From the Thirties Quotes

Unlike men writers who marry, most will not have the societal equivalent of a wife-- nor (in a society hostile to growing life) anyone but themselves to mother their children.

Silences Quotes

But there is more – to rebel against what will not let life be.

Yonnondio: From the Thirties 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.

Silence Quotes

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

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

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

Tell Me a Riddle Quotes

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?