Home / Quotes / Quote by Tillie Olsen

Quote by Tillie Olsen

“That's what I want to be when I grow up, just a peaceful wreck holding hands with other peaceful wrecks.”

Quote by Tillie Olsen

Book:Tell Me a Riddle, Requa I, and Other Works

Work

Tell Me a Riddle, Requa I, and Other Works

This book is a compilation of poetry, including the title piece 'Tell Me a Riddle, Requa I', and other selected works from different poets. more

Author

Tillie Olsen (January 14, 1912 – January 1, 2007) was an American writer, feminist activist, and social critic. She is best known for her short story collection Tell Me a Riddle and her essay Silences, which focus on working-class women, motherhood, and the silences imposed on artistic creation. Born to Jewish immigrant parents in Omaha, Nebraska, Olsen left school at age 15 due to poverty and worked various manual jobs. Her writing career began late, but her profound depictions of marginalized lives made her a significant voice in 20th-century American literature. Her work influenced feminist literary criticism and inspired many women writers. more

You May Also Like

“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.”

Source: Silences

“Writers in a profit making economy are an exploitable commodity whose works are products to be marketed, and are so judged and handled.”

Economy Products Profit Judged Commodity

Book:Silences

Source: Silences

“Compared to men writers of like distinction and years of life, few women writers have had lives of unbroken productivity, or leave behind a 'body of work.' Early beginnings, then silence; or clogged late ones (foreground silences); long periods between books (hidden silences); characterize most of us.”

Men Years Long Book Body Behinds Silence Periods Late Productivity Distinction Unbroken Years Of Life Foreground

Book:Silences

Source: Silences

“Happiness will never be any greater than the idea we have of it.”

Ideas Greater Positive

Author:Maurice Maeterlinck

“The dandy should aspire to be uninterruptedly sublime. He should live and sleep in front of a mirror.”

Should Sleep Fronts Mirrors Aspire Sublime Dandy

Author:Charles Baudelaire

“I am the vampire at my own veins.”

My Own Vampire Veins

Book:Les Fleurs Du Mal

Source: Les Fleurs Du Mal

“Live in such a way as, when you come to die, you will wish to have lived. [Ger., Lebe, wie Du, wenn du stirbst, Wunschen wirst, gelebt zu haben.]”

Way Life Dies Wish

Author:Christian Furchtegott Gellert

“For where's the State beneath the Firmament, That doth excell the Bees for Government?”

States Government Bees Firmament

Book:The Complete Works of Joshuah Sylvester: For the First Time Collected and Edited

Source: The Complete Works of Joshuah Sylvester: For the First Time Collected and Edited

“There is no Theam more plentifull to scan, Then is the glorious goodly frame of Man.”

Author:Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas

“For the first time in six or seven thousand years, many people of goodwill find themselves confused about art. They want to enjoy it because enjoying art is something they expect of themselves as civilized persons, but they're unsure how to do so. They aren't even sure which of the visible objects are art and which are furniture, clothes, hors d'oeuvres, or construction rubble, and whether a pile of dead and decomposing rats is deliberate art or just another pile of decomposing rats.”

Source: Wasn't the Grass Greener?: A Curmudgeon's Fond Memories