Tillie Olsen > Quotes

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

“It is a long Baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion and in pain than to live untouched. Yet how will you sustain?”
― Tillie Olsen

“But there is more – to rebel against what will not let life be.”
― Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: From the Thirties

“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.”
― Tillie Olsen

“There are worse words than cuss-words, there are words that hurt.”
― Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle

“What in me demanded that goodness in her? And what was the cost, the cost to her of such goodness?”
― Tillie Olsen

“She kept too much in herself. Her life was such that she had to keep too much in herself. My wisdom came too late. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear. 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. Only help her to know, help make it so there is cause for her to know that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.”
― Tillie Olsen

“And could you not make a cameo of this and pin it onto your aesthetic hearts?”
― Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: From the Thirties

“Unlike men writers who marry, most will not have the societal equivalent of a wife-- nor (in a society hostile to growing life) anyone but themselves to mother their children.”
― Tillie Olsen, Silences

“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.”
― Tillie Olsen, I Stand Here Ironing

“Mazie sits with a sense of non-being over her – of it being someone other than she sitting there timeless, suspended in a dusky room, feeling a voice gathering around her, kind still hands of sound flaring into words meaningless and strange, meaningless when one tries to understand, but meaningful for a fleeting second.”
― Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: From the Thirties

“Never saw so many peaceful wrecks in my life.... That's what I want to be when I grow up, just a peaceful wreck holding hands with other peaceful wrecks.”
― Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle

“The rats shall be your birds, and the rocks plopping in the water your music. And death shall be your wife, who woos you in the brief moments when coal leaps from a bursting side, when a cross-piece falls and barely misses your head, when you barely catch the ladder to bring you up out of the hole you are dynamiting.”
― Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: From the Thirties

“More than in any human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible. It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity.”
― Tillie Olsen, Silences

“An old man, Elias Caldwell, death already smothering his breast, tries to tell a child something of all he has learned, something of what he would have her live by – and hears only incoherent words come out. Yet the thoughts revolve, revolve and whirl, a scorching nebula in his breast, sending forth flaming suns that only shatter against the walls and return to chaos. How can it be said? Once I lived in softness and ease and sickened. Once I chose a stern life, turning to people hard, bitter and strong – obscure people, the smell of soil and sweat about them – the smell of life…But I failed. I brought them nothing. To die, how bitter when nothing was done with my life. And the nebula whirls and revolves, sending its scorching suns that break in a chaos of inarticulateness about this child with a sound of fear. Nothing of it said.”
― Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: From the Thirties

“And Tracy was young, just twenty, still wet behind the ears, and the old blinders were on him so he couldn't really see what was around and he believed the bull about freedomofopportunity and a chancetorise and ifyoureallywanttoworkyoucanalwaysfindajob and ruggedindividualism and something about pursuitofhappiness.”
― Tillie Olsen

“Perhaps it frightens you as you walk by, the travail of the trees against the dark crouched house, the weak tipsy light in the window, the man sitting on the porch, menacing weariness riding his flesh like despair.”
― Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: From the Thirties

“Bess who has been fingering a fruit-lid jar lid — absently, heedlessly dropped it — aimlessly groping across the table, reclaims it again. Lightning in her brain. She releases, grabs, releases, grabs. I can do. Bang! I did that. I can do. I! ... Centuries of human drive work in her; human ecstasy of achievement. satisfaction deep and fundamental as sex: I can do, I use my powers; I! I!”
― Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio from the Thirties

“Olsen apunta y dispara contra la falacia de que el hambre estimula la creatividad.”
― Tillie Olsen, Silencios

“Ayudad a formar escritoras, lo cual, tal vez, os incluya también a vosotras mismas. Hay tantas cosas que nunca se han escrito y necesitan escribirse…”
― Tillie Olsen, Silencios

“Porque la literatura nace de lo real y construye realidad.”
― Tillie Olsen, Silencios

“It has never yet been a world right for love, for those we love, for ourselves, for flowered human life.”
― Tillie Olsen, Silences

“«Debes elegir entre el arte y tu realización como mujer, entre la música y la vida familiar» le dijo el psicoanalista. «¿Por qué? ¿Por qué debo elegir? Nadie dijo a Toscanini, a Bach o a mi padre que debían elegir entre su arte y su vida personal y familiar, entre aquel y su realización como hombres”
― Tillie Olsen, Silencios

“De noche [ya no puedo] escribir. Estoy tan reventada que solo soy capaz de escuchar un poco de música con una copa de brandy con agua». El humo de la cocina, el humo del infierno flotaban en su cabeza. La sonrisa de la nevera la aniquilaba. Apestaba a grasa y a caca de bebé, ¡la perversidad de la cocina! Y no había quien detuviera el chorro sangriento de la poesía, para el que nunca quedaban fuerzas ni tiempo, salvo, quizá, a esa hora azul anterior al llanto del bebé.101”
― Tillie Olsen, Silencios

“Se relaciona con lo que Olsen llama «el distinto pasado de las mujeres.» Una historia de cuidados hacia los demás y violencias hacia el género femenino: lapidaciones, incineraciones de mujeres vivas en la pira funeraria del esposo, esclavitud, violaciones, analfabetismo, exclusión. El lugar al que nos condenan las religiones. El”
― Tillie Olsen, Silencios

“Olsen es más directa. Ha de trabajar para sobrevivir. No puede escribir. Además, como todas nosotras, es una mujer marcada, biológica y culturalmente, para la maternidad y los cuidados. Menos”
― Tillie Olsen, Silencios