Quotessence
Home / Authors / Tillie Olsen Biography
Tillie Olsen

Tillie Olsen Biography

Writer

Related Quotes

“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!”

ChildrenHumanityEvolutionBabies
Book:Yonnondio from the Thirties
Create image

“Literature is a place for generosity and affection and hunger for equals - not a prizefight ring. We are increased, confirmed in our medium, roused to do our best, by every good writer, every fine achievement. Would we want one good writer or fine book less? The sense of writers being pitted against each other is bred primarily by the workings of the commercial marketplace, and by critics lauding one writer at the expense of another while ignoring the existence of nearly all.”

WantBookLiteratureExistenceFineAchievementCriticsVery GoodHungerAffectionRingsMediumsGenerosityExpensesMarketplaceGood Writers
Book:Silences
Create image

“The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years - responses to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters - stay with you, mark you, become you. The cost of discontinuity (that pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what should take weeks take me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.”

ShouldWritingYearsFirstsStillsSometimesMatterResponsibilityWeekMaterialsBrokenMonthsHabitCircumstancesCostWeightMarkLifetimeResponsePatternsTake MeAccumulationUnsaidDiscontinuity
Book:Silences
Create image

“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.”

NeedsWritingYearsLyingDiesSpeakNaturalDarkSilenceStruggleSpecialCreationCyclesAgonyRenewalUnnaturalTediousMuteSpecial NeedsGestation
Author:Tillie Olsen
Create image