Dorothy Allison Quotes

Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I'd rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.

Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.

I tell my students you have an absolute right to write about people you know and love. You do. But the kicker is you have a responsibility to make the characters large enough that you will not have sinned against them.

Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.

I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.

Hunger makes you restless. you dream about food - not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother's milk singing to your bloodstream.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.

One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.

The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different...I claimed myself and remade my life. Only when I knew I belonged to myself completely did I become capable of giving myself to another, of finding joy in desire, pleasure in our love, power in this body no one else owns.

I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.

Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you that there is magic in it, and if you show yourself naked for me, I'll be naked for you. It will be our covenant.

For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength or something not human at all. Me, I told people, I take damage like a wall, a brick wall that never falls down, never feels anything, never flinches or remembers. I am one woman but I carry in my body all the stories I have ever been told, women I have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all.

The only magic we have is what we make in ourselves, the muscles we build up on the inside, the sense of belief we create from nothing.

There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto-God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.

Everything that comes to us is a blessing or a test. That’s all you need to know in this life…just the certainty that God’s got His eye on you, that He knows what you are made of, what you need to grow on. Why,questioning’s a sin, it’s pointless. He will show you your path in His own good time. And long as I remember that, I’m fine.

I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Children go crazy. Really, even children go crazy, believing the shape of the life they must live is as small and mean and broken as they are told.

It has seemed to me that literature, as I meant it, was embattled, that it was increasingly difficult to find writing doing what I thought literature should do - which was simply to push people into changing their ideas about the world, and to go further, to encourage us in the work of changing the world, to making it more just and more truly human.

Babies change things, open doors you thought were shut, close others. Make you into something you never been.

When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.

I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.

I think I would have died if there hadn't been the women's movement.

I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way.

I put on the page a third look at what I've seen in life - the reinvented experience of a cross-eyed working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine.

I told her, Don't touch me that way. Don't come at me with that sour-cream smile. Come at me as if I were worth your life - the life we make together. Take me like a turtle whose shell must be cracked, whose heart is ice, who needs your heat. Love me like a warrior, sweat up to your earlobes and all your hope between your teeth. Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you have ever wanted.

my life has been saved over and over again by picking up a book in which someone captured the whole experience of being despised and not dying.

Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs.

What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.

Delia picked at the raw sores of her conscience...Drunk or sober, Delia lived in the small town in her heart, ignoring the world in which all her love had turned to grief.

I don't believe that there is any true friendship without a bond of honor, and the honor in friendship is the respect you give the other that she also gives you.

It ain't that you get religion. Religion gets you and then milks you dry. Won't let you drink a little whiskey. Won't let you make no fat-assed girls grin and giggle. Won't let you do a damn thing except work for what you'll get in the hearafter. I live in the here and now.

I wanted to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. I wanted to run away from who we had been seen to be, who we had been... It's the first thing I think of when trouble comes - the geographic solution. Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over. What hides behind that impulse is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, is valueless, better off abandoned, that running away is easier than trying to change things, that change itself is not possible.

If I could have found what I needed at thirteen, I would not have lost so much of my life chasing vindication or death. Give some child, some thirteen-year old, the hope of the remade life. Tell the truth. Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you there is magic in it.

Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe.

I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats.

Behind the story I tell is the one I don't...Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.

I think I would have died if there hadn't been the women's movement. It gave me a vision that I could do something different, and it gave me an understanding that I wasn't a monster, or sport, or a betrayer of my family.

And while it is true that I got the best woman in the world, I don't think love saves you.

That was what gospel was meant to do - make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified.

I can't write what I don't believe in.

People don't do right because of the fear of God or love of him. You do right because the world doesn't make sense if you don't.

Don't go taking that gospel stuff seriously. It's nice to clean you out now and then, but it ain't for real. It's like bad whiskey. Run through you fast and leave you with pain.

... survival is the least of my desires.

It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.