Quotes by Tillie Olsen

“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.”

“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 t...”

“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 parent...”

“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 ol...”

“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 th...”

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

“History gives me hope. The century has also been full of resistance. Why is it that the resistance movements--often so heroic and so ingenious--get obliterated from consciousness? There's always be...”

“I buy 100 copies at a time of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was Eleanor Roosevelt's great work...I sometimes, if it's an adult audience, ask how many of them are familiar with the U...”

“We also read Lenin on housework, which is a very, very interesting essay. He uses the word degrading, which I never felt, because you really see the results of what you've done. But the enormous am...”

“There was a guy who testified before the Un-American Activities Committee that it was at the house of Jack and Tillie Olsen that everybody was ordered to throw their party books into the fireplace....”

“There's been some change, as is evident by the number of women writers who are read. And education itself has somewhat changed. There's a lot more encouragement, a lot more writing classes. It was ...”

“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...”

“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 bee...”

“I have a lot of hope from young people, too, with that flame of freedom and light of knowledge, as well as from some of the old people, whom I honor a lot. There's the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, who ...”

“Literary history and the present are dark with silences: some the silences for years by our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some the ceasing to publish after one work appears; some the ne...”

“In the last century, of the women whose achievements endure for us in one way or another, nearly all never married (Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott...”

“In our century, until very recently, it has not been so different. Most did not marry (Selma Lagerlof, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Gertrude Stein, Gabriela Mistral, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Charlo...”