Stanford University Faculty

"beginning of the short story "Tell Me a Riddle" (1960), also included in Tell Me a Riddle, Requa I and Other Works (2013)"

"The power and the need to create, over and beyond reproduction, is native in both women and men. Where the gifted among women (and men) have remained mute, or have never attained full capacity, it is because of circumstances, inner or outer, which oppose the needs of creation."

"two exceedingly important creative and political lives."

"She's about ten years older than I am, and she really grew up into the Depression, and was married at that time, and had kids at a very hard time. She went into really hard times when she was at that age, which I didn't. But we come from very similar backgrounds, really. Our families were Socialist Russian Jews mostly and we have very political feelings in common, and the sense that that tradition and that history have been really subverted and mocked, and a strong feeling for the lives of women. We have disagreements, too, I have to say, but of course I admire her an awful lot. And I think she's really our scholar, our own. I mean people have spoken to me and said I haven't done enough work; that I've been doing all this politics and stuff, and that's true. But she hasn't been doing a lot of her fiction work; she's been doing a lot of feminist scholarship. She's really done that for everybody, for all of us. So she means a lot."

"So I spent much of my childhood on picket lines and tagging along on meetings because she didn't have childcare. She had four daughters. So part of being Tillie's daughter was really inheriting that legacy of both understanding that the world isn't just and must not be allowed to be anymore. But she also had this incredible belief that people could change history...It's just the sheer beauty of Tillie's words, that the way she uses the words touch your heart and rip it wide open."

"Heroes: Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, Shirley Chisholm — what a generation!"

"Public libraries were my sustenance and my college."

"I learned a lot being around cows," she recalled in 2002. "It seemed to me they were so damned patient."

"Sad is the country that requires women's studies, black and ethnic studies."

"We lefties said over and over and over again, "If Hitler and Mussolini and Franco win there, there's going to be World War II." If only we'd had enough power, millions of people would be alive and the Holocaust would never have happened."

"I will say I knew I wanted to write about women and children, but I put it off for a couple of years because I thought, People will think this is trivial, nothing. Then I thought, It’s what I have to write. It’s what I want to read. And I don’t see it out there. Meanwhile, the women’s movement had begun to gather force. It needed to become the second wave. It turned out that we were some of the drops in the wave. Tillie (Olsen) was more like a cupful."

"Tillie Olson and I didn’t know it, but we were part of a movement."

"She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others."

"The college of activism--that whole participation with others in trying to make change for the better. When I had only one child, I was already a labor activist. I did leaflets for unions in the old mimeograph days way back in 1932 and '33. And of course, '34 was the year when union organizations finally were really winning. The General Strike was my second-ever arrest. The city jail was just packed. We'd be serenaded every night from the men's section with "Let Me Call You Sweetheart.""

"What does hope have to do with it? It depends on time, circumstances, whether or not your writing lives the life of being read, taught. Certainly, for years, I wrote of women's lives, working class lives, when few others were. I do know that the two talks printed in Silences had real impact at the time, as did my reading lists--for academics, especially. I haven't published a lot of fiction. I haven't published a lot of anything. But it does go on, it's taught, anthologized. That's very dear to me, and dearest of all are the people whom it has affected. I know that for some people, they feel that it's their life or the life of their mother, or alcoholic relative [that I'm writing about], or they suffer over a daughter and think, "my wisdom came too late" [as the speaker says in "I Stand Here Ironing"]."

"Because 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. And there was the wonder of the black church, right around the corner. I loved that music so much, sometimes I'd go sit on the stairs. Once one of the women said, "Why don't you come up and sit in a real chair?" So I went in and came every Sunday I could. I also had luck because I was proud of my class--because of growing up with Socialist parents and having sat on Eugene V. Debs's lap and given him red roses. And hearing him. I remember how he said passionately, "You are not heads to them, brains that can think. You are not hearts to them, that can feel. You are hands." And he held up his hands. And he started, you know: "Cowhands, farmhands. . . ." I was impressed again by the power of language."

"I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron."

"Little is written about revolutionaries, let alone Jews who became atheists, "idealists," some people might term them, not "realists." I like to quote William James, who said, "The world can and has been changed by those to whom the ideal and the real are dynamically contiguous." It was their struggle to do this and make needed changes. There was a period in my parents' lives--it was a period in our country's life--when the ideal and the real were dynamically contiguous. They really felt that the international movement was going to change the world and make it a more just, human place. They were young when they came here, but they'd lived so very, very much. The world is so different from the world of their youth and the world of my youth. Still, power is primarily held by people of wealth and position. By and large, class interest still rules in our country. Who are the people who make policy and how do they get there? You may get an elite education, but you don't learn labor history (which means the lives of most of humanity)."

"Tillie Olsen, another superb woman writer, has warned that whenever writers are put in a special category, whether it be "women's writer," "proletarian writer," or "black writer," their work is being subtly devalued, someone is putting them on a reservation."

"There are "hidden injuries of class" whether you are conscious of it or not."

"Think about all that we've lost that has been said orally because nobody was taking it down. I feel very fortunate to live in a time where we have so many different voices. We have a much richer literature than we've ever had, and we can know our country so much better."

"The great college of motherhood. You learn so much about human development, human capacity. And it doesn't have to do with whether you have wealth and advantage or not. It has to do with the parenting those first few years before the world comes in with its enormous effect. The ecstasy of achievement when you first learn to walk, the passion for language. When children first learn to talk sentences, you usually can't shut them up. When they learn how to climb, for instance, again the ecstasy of achievement, that real hunger to learn, to have experiences, to be on top of something."

"Central High School was where I first learned about the power of circumstances, about economics. I learned about what people of color were like through my neighborhood relationships, and also that there was racist hatred because there was a lynching in our neighborhood...I still have a recurring nightmare--the smell of burning flesh and a boy about my age whose father is trying to put this open pocketknife in his hand, pushing him, and telling him to go up [to the hanged man] and bring back part of his ear."

"In that Czarist Russia, Jewish girls were not taught even to read and write. It took (my mother) becoming a revolutionary and joining the Bund, the Jewish Bund, a socialist organization, to learn to read and love books."

"I very much dislike the word "race," and I never use it. I use the word "racist." Race is not a fact. There is only one race: human. Skin color is less than 2 percent of the DNA."

"Almost no mothers as almost no part-time, part-self persons-have created enduring literature... so far."

"I think a lot of what she writes is really for others, she's speaking for other people, and she feels their pain keenly."

""But there is more – to rebel against what will not let life be.”"

"What Tillie Olsen has to say is of primary importance to those who want to understand how art is generated or subverted and to those trying to create it themselves."

"A passion and a purpose inform Silences pages: love for my incomparable medium, literature; hatred for all that, societally rooted, unnecessarily lessens and denies it; slows, impairs, silences writers. It is written to re-dedicate and encourage."

"The whistles always woke Mazie. They pierced into her sleep like some guttural-voiced metal beast, tearing at her; breathing a terror. During the day if the whistle blew, she knew it meant death-somebody's poppa or brother, perhaps her own-in that fearsome place below the ground, the mine. (first lines)"

"The current possession by women of literature by women writers is a phenomenon novel in my lifetime, and perhaps in general, I can remember when women students were annoyed with my syllabus because it contained mostly "lady writers." But now there are not enough Kate Chopins to satisfy. And when Tillie Olsen, whose stories we had read at the beginning of the year, was to visit the class, the anticipation was greater than anything I have known..., "Tell us, Tillie," the students asked, "how you came to be a writer." "Who encouraged you?" "What made you decide you could do it?" Some of the women asking the questions were her age. How could she not tell them about her life? Especially since her life was like theirs. Indeed, her life, she said, was in stories. She had written "I Stand Here Ironing" on the ironing board, in between chores. She knew that immigrant woman. Her life was in those stories and we must not be embarrassed to announce that we recognize the life as our own."

"Tillie Olsen's short story "I Stand Here Ironing" shows the ways in which a woman's ideas about change and progress and growth may be interpreted through her own experience...This is a personal story of a woman's problems, as my friend wrote. But it is also a political overture orchestrated out of the dailiness of Olsen's life and of the women she knew. This story tells us that change comes slowly, across the generations; that there is often damage in growth, some of it irreparable; that men, self-absorbed in their own turmoils, often abandon women and children; that help, however well-meaning, is often steeped in privileges of class (or race), and may in any event, as in this case, be too late."

"the atom bomb was in manufacture before the first automatic washing machine"

"There are a few writers who manage in their work and in the sharing of their understanding to actually help us to live, to work, to create, day by day. Tillie Olsen is one of those writers for me."

"When I go to California, I spend time with Tillie [Olsen]. I mean time, like hours and hours; I stay at her house, we have taken long walks, you know. And I don't have really literary discussions with her. I don't have the knack. I mean we talk a little bit about it, but mostly we talk about women's lives, about different ideas. We have talked recently about language and Mary Daly. I guess that is literary. We've had long talks on that subject. But again I'm really more interested in political life than literary life. So Tillie and I talk about politics, women, the world. And we've done different things in our lives. She'll tell me about the thirties and forties which is terribly interesting to me."

"It's hard for me to talk about the terrible things that have happened in my lifetime because they didn't need to be."

"There is reconciliation in the house where your mother lies weeping (chapter 6, p130)"

"Few writers have gained such wide respect on such a small body of published work," the novelist Margaret Atwood wrote in the New York Times Book Review, noting that for female writers "reverence" for Ms. Olsen was a more apt word. "This is presumably because women writers, even more than their male counterparts, recognize what a heroic feat it is to have held down a job, raised four children and still somehow managed to become and to remain a writer."

"Joining self-assertion with interdependence, Olsen's vision is a strongly feminist one. When women live only through their families, she suggests, they arc denied their own individuality and any possibility for a larger connection to humankind. As Olsen herself recognizes, at its core this vision is also a Jewish one, drawn from her Jewish socialist background. As she explained in a recent interview, this background, which she calls Yiddishkeit, taught her "knowledge and experience of injustice, of discrimination, of oppression, of genocide and of the need to act against them forever and whenever they appear," as well as "an absolute belief in the potentiality of human beings." As Olsen says, "What is Yiddish in me ... is inextricable from what is woman in me, from woman who is mother.""

"For women writers the systematic discouragement even to attempt to become writers has been so constant and pervasive a force that we cannot consider their literary productions without somehow assessing the effects of that barrage of discouragement. Often discouraged in the home, often at school, often by families and spouses, the rare woman writer who does not lose her determination along the way is already a survivor. That one should next have to face the systematic discouragement of a male-oriented literary establishment is absurd and sad but nonetheless a real fact of life for many women writers. (Footnote: No one has chronicled this repression better than Tillie Olsen in her splendid book Silences.)"

"Tillie Olsen's is a unique voice. Few writers have gained such wide respect based on such a small body of published work...Among women writers in the United States, "respect" is too pale a word: "reverence" is more like it. This is presumably because women writers, even more than their male counterparts, recognize what a heroic feat it is to have held down a job, raised four children and still somehow managed to become and to remain a writer. The exactions of this multiple identity cost Tillie Olsen 20 years of her writing life. The applause that greets her is not only for the quality of her artistic performance but, as at a grueling obstacle race, for the near miracle of her survival."

"Earlier this year, a self-identified White, monolingual English-speaking teacher explained to me that, among other signs of her stupidity, Dr Baez’s English language skills are ‘horrible, and from what I hear, her Spanish isn’t that good either’...If Dr Baez, the bilingual school principal with multiple university degrees, including a doctorate in education, was subjected to such discriminatory thinking, then what could this mean for students, who were positioned in highly subordinate institutional positions?"

"Jorge’s and Yesi’s experiences show how particular enactments of Puerto Ricaness and Mexicanness were viewed as problematic. Not coincidentally, Jorge and Yesi became marked in part because of their Spanish and English language practices, respectively."

"While bilingual is understood as a valuable asset or goal for middle-class and upper-class students, for working-class and poor students it is framed as a disability that must be overcome"

"Whereas claims about biological inferiority are no longer acceptable in mainstream US public discourse, claims about linguistic inferiority are often perceived as perfectly legitimate."

"NNHS students discussed Americanness in their everyday interactions. For example, Mr Ford, a popular White teacher, made a jocular reference to the title of a popular television show when he told a classroom full of seniors who had not completed an assignment that they ‘should be called America’s biggest losers!’ A mexican girl (Gen 3, Grade 12) retorted, ‘But we’re not even American!’ This kind of comment reflects Latinx students’ awareness that they were positioned as somehow un-American."

"I think this is a very common phenomenon that happens with marginalized populations where people who are marked in particular ways based on race, gender, and sexuality, especially, there’s this sense that you’re all the same and you all could be a spokesperson for whatever set of ideas."

"I was writing about what I called, “ideologies of languagelessness,” that just framed certain populations as deficient in any language that they use. It’s not just certain populations. It’s racialized populations."

"some of these genetic ancestry tests which proport to find race in your genes but, in fact, have to presume that race already lives in your genes in order to then find it there. If you understand race to be something historically constructed, then it doesn’t live in your genes."