"Tillie Olsen's Silences will, like A Room of One's Own, be quoted wherever there is talk of the circumstances in whic…"

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

"Public libraries were my sustenance and my college."

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

"Sometimes the young-discouraged, overwhelmed-ask me incredulously: "You mean you still have hope?" And I hear myself …"

"For forty-seven years they had been married. How deep back the stubborn, gnarled roots of the quarrel reached, no one…"

"beginning of the short story "Tell Me a Riddle" (1960), also included in Tell Me a Riddle, Requa I and Other Works (2…"

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

"It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion than to live untouched."

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