Tillie Olsen
Tillie Olsen
Tillie Lerner Olsen was an American writer associated with the political turmoil of the 1930s and the first generation of American feminists...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth14 January 1913
CountryUnited States of America
Tillie Olsen quotes about
writing survival survivor
Every woman who writes is a survivor.
peace growing-up hands
That's what I want to be when I grow up, just a peaceful wreck holding hands with other peaceful wrecks ...
time time-management remember
And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?
writing kind audience
Not to have an audience is a kind of death.
moving solitude rhythm
She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others.
mean motherhood responsible
More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, and responsible
reality surface degrade
Women have the right to say: this is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.
daughter sea long
It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion than to live untouched.
time scary scared
The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.
lying struggle writing
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.