Vicki

“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

“They're probably mad because you're smart and make good grades. Kids are stupid like that. The teachers love you, though, right?"
"I'll tell you what my mom says teachers don't love," said Frank. "Being corrected.”
― Julia Claiborne Johnson, Be Frank With Me

“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

“What I don't understand is where women suddenly get power. Because they do. The kids, who almost always turn out to be a pile of shit, are, we all know, Mommy's fault. Well, how did she manage that, this powerless creature? Where was all her power during the years she was doing five loads of laundry a week and worrying about mixing the whites with the colors? How was she able to offset Daddy's positive influence? How come she never knows she has this power until afterward, when it gets called responsibility?”
― Marilyn French, The Women's Room