32 Quotes by Tillie Olsen

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Better immersion than to live untouched.

Every woman who writes is a survivor.

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