Quotes by Tillie Olsen

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

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.

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

I know that I havent powers enough to divide myself into one who earns and one who creates.

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

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

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