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

- Tillie Olsen

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

- Tillie Olsen

More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, and responsible

- Tillie Olsen

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

- Tillie Olsen

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 fo…

- Tillie Olsen

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 r…

- Tillie Olsen

I don't want to die leaving the world as it is right now.

- Tillie Olsen

Every woman who writes is a survivor.

- Tillie Olsen

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 …

- Tillie Olsen