32 Quotes by Tillie Olsen

Not to have an audience is a kind of death.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.