Quotes by Tillie Olsen, Author of Tell Me a Riddle
By Emma Ward | On October 12, 2017 | Updated May 8, 2023 | Comments (0)
Tillie Olsen (1912 – 2007) was born in Nebraska to Russian-Jewish immigrants whose socialist politics and activism inspired her work. Following is a selection of quotes by Tillie Olsen.
Olsen wrote her first novel, Yonnondio: From the Thirties, at the age of 19 while she was helping support her family, though it wasn’t published until some years later.
Olsen felt she didn’t fulfill her potential as a writer, spending many years raising four daughters. She poured some of that frustration into what’s now considered a feminist nonfiction classic, Silences (1978). Perhaps her best known work is the short story Tell Me a Riddle.
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“But there is more – to rebel against what will not let life be.” (from Yonnandio: From the Thirties)
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“The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.” (from “I Stand Here Ironing”)
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“I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with time.” (from “I Stand Here Ironing”)
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More about Tillie Olsen
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“Let him wrack his head for how they would live. She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythm of others.” (from “Tell Me a Riddle”)
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“There are worse words than cuss words, there are words that can hurt.”(from “Tell Me a Riddle”)
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“It was not that she had not loved her babies, her children. The love — the passion of tending — had risen with the need like a torrent and like a torrent drowned and immolated all else. But when the need was done — oh the power thatwa lost in the painful damming back and drying up of what still surged, but had nowhere to go.” (from “Tell Me a Riddle”)
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“I’m a human being and human beings have a need to express themselves. Also, I stuttered. So I listened a lot, and there was a lot to listen to in my neighborhood.” (from an interview in The Progressive Magazine, 1999)
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Silences by Tillie Olsen: On Being a Writer and a Mother
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“History gives me hope.” (From an interview for The Progressive, 1999)
Quotes from Silences
“More and more women writers … are assuming as their right fullness of work and family life. Their emergence is evidence of changing circumstances making it possible for them what (with rarest exception) was not possible in the generations of women before. I hope and I fear for what will result. I hope (and believe) the complex new richness will come into literature; I fear because almost certainly there work will be impeded, lessened, partial.”
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“Time granted does not necessarily coincide with time that can be most fully used.”
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“More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible.”
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“And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?”
“For the fundamental situation remains unchanged. I’m like men writers who marry, most will not have the societal equivalent of a wife — nor (in a society hostile to growing life) anyone but themselves to mother their children.”
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“Even those who can afford help, good schools, summer camps, may suffer what 70 years ago W.E.B. Du Bois called ‘The Damnation of Women”: that the only at the sacrifice of the chance to do their best work can women bear in rear children.’ And: ‘Substantial creative achievement demand time … and with rare exceptions only full time workers have created it.’”
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“I know that I haven’t powers enough to divide myself into one who earns and one who creates.”
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“Circumstances for sustained creations are almost impossible. Not because the capacities to create no longer exist, or the need (though for a while as in any fullness of life the need may be obscured), but the need cannot be first. You can have a best only part self, part time. Motherhood means instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible. Children need one now (and remember, in our society, the family must often try to be the center for love and health outside world is not).”
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“Be critical. Women have the right to say: This is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.”
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“The very fact that these are needs of love, not duty, that one feels them as one’s self; that there is no one else to be responsible for these needs, gives them primacy. It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant, toil. Work interrupted, deferred, postponed, makes blockage — at best, lesser accomplishment. Unused capacities at trophy, cease to be.”
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“… the habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing I’m not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years — response to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters — mark you, become you. The cost of discontinuity is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what you take weeks, takes me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.”
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“I speak for myself to bring here the sense of those others to whom this is in the process of happening … into remind us of those (I so nearly was one) who never come to writing at all.”
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“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.”
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