Olive Senior > Quotes

“For she acted exactly as she pleased, laughed at his strictures against her behaviour, her friends, his lectures on 'respectability'. She was the first woman in his existence who had a life of her own, who did things simply because they pleased her, who argued, who asserted herself. There was only one role he was equipped to play which was to resist, to the bitter end, this encroachment as he saw it on his authority, his manhood. And bitter it became.”
― Olive Senior, Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Other Stories

“At least I knew all about falling in love. It was the falling out that I couldn't manage.”
― Olive Senior

“...it is not always that we want friends to be so reasonable and rational about things. Sometimes we want people we like to agree with us, to say yes, you have been hard done by, regardless.”
― Olive Senior, Dancing Lessons

“Normal is a universe that is predictable and trustworthy.”
― Olive Senior, Dancing Lessons

“I forced myself to think rationally, something that is conveniently omitted from the upbringing of us women (otherwise my God how we would change the world!)”
― Olive Senior, Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Other Stories

“I do not apologise for baring my soul (though I did not intend to)”
― Olive Senior, Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Other Stories

“For it is only in other people's gaze that we see ourselves, isn't it?”
― Olive Senior, Dancing Lessons

“Women like Larissa, pulled far from their homes and families by the promise of work, were not expected to grieve; their sorrow, like their true selves, remained muted and hidden.”
― Olive Senior, The Pain Tree

“When you go to that big country, Miss Katie, it have everything there. Everything a person could want in the whole wide world. But don’t get big-eye. Don’t turn wanti-wanti. Promise. You hold strain and think of them poor little ones back here that don’t have nothing. Eat for one, lest you turn into two.”
― Olive Senior, The Pain Tree

“People who mattered, we believed, resided in the great house. It was we who made history, a series of events unfolding with each generation. And yet, I realized now, it was in this room, Larissa’s, that I had first learnt that history is not dates or abstraction but a space where memory becomes layered and textured. What is real is what you carry around inside of you.”
― Olive Senior, The Pain Tree

“People like me would always inherit the land, but they were the ones who already possessed the Earth.”
― Olive Senior, The Pain Tree

“The thought came, unbidden, that only those who are born rich can afford the luxury of not wanting to own anything. We can try it on as a way of avoiding complicity. But in my heart of hearts I know my inheritance already possesses me.”
― Olive Senior, The Pain Tree

“But how could he have, when women themselves had suddenly gone insane, were rejecting the direction, the protection, that their menfolk offered them, were recklessly plunging off on their own into unknown and unspeakable depths?”
― Olive Senior, Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Other Stories