Tillie Olsen Quotes

17 quotes in 172 categories

• More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, and responsible
• Lighting does occasionally strike and occasional the result isn't a corpse.
• Not to have an audience is a kind of death.
• 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.
• Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over…
• I know that I haven’t powers enough to divide myself into one who earns and one who creates.
• Better immersion than to live untouched.
• She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others.
• Every woman who writes is a survivor.
• It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion than to live untouched.
• Time granted does not necessarily coincide with time that can be most fully used.
• And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?
• The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.
• Be critical. Women have the right to say: This is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.

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