Tillie Olsen

“The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.”

“There are worse words than cuss words, there are words that hurt.”

“And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?”

“I know that I haven't powers enough to divide myself into one who earns and one who creates.”

“Time granted does not necessarily coincide with time that can be most fully used.”

“Women have the right to say: this is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.”

“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.”