Yonnondio Quotes

“But there is more – to rebel against what will not let life be.”
― Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: From the Thirties

“And could you not make a cameo of this and pin it onto your aesthetic hearts?”
― Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: From the Thirties

“Mazie sits with a sense of non-being over her – of it being someone other than she sitting there timeless, suspended in a dusky room, feeling a voice gathering around her, kind still hands of sound flaring into words meaningless and strange, meaningless when one tries to understand, but meaningful for a fleeting second.”
― Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: From the Thirties

“An old man, Elias Caldwell, death already smothering his breast, tries to tell a child something of all he has learned, something of what he would have her live by – and hears only incoherent words come out. Yet the thoughts revolve, revolve and whirl, a scorching nebula in his breast, sending forth flaming suns that only shatter against the walls and return to chaos. How can it be said? Once I lived in softness and ease and sickened. Once I chose a stern life, turning to people hard, bitter and strong – obscure people, the smell of soil and sweat about them – the smell of life…But I failed. I brought them nothing. To die, how bitter when nothing was done with my life. And the nebula whirls and revolves, sending its scorching suns that break in a chaos of inarticulateness about this child with a sound of fear. Nothing of it said.”
― Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: From the Thirties

“The rats shall be your birds, and the rocks plopping in the water your music. And death shall be your wife, who woos you in the brief moments when coal leaps from a bursting side, when a cross-piece falls and barely misses your head, when you barely catch the ladder to bring you up out of the hole you are dynamiting.”
― Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: From the Thirties

“Perhaps it frightens you as you walk by, the travail of the trees against the dark crouched house, the weak tipsy light in the window, the man sitting on the porch, menacing weariness riding his flesh like despair.”
― Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: From the Thirties