The fact that human beings do not put up forever with misery, humiliation, degradation, actual physical deprivation but act is a fact which every human being should know about. We are a species that makes changes.
Tillie OlsenMore than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, and responsible
Tillie OlsenIt is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil.
Tillie OlsenLiterary 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