Best 86 quotes of Dorothy Allison on MyQuotes

Dorothy Allison

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    Dorothy Allison

    And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained. And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.

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    Dorothy Allison

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

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    Dorothy Allison

    Beauty is a hard thing. Beauty is a mean story. Beauty is slender girls who die young, fine-featured delicate creatures about whom men write poems. Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time. And I loved her for that.

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    Dorothy Allison

    Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.

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    Dorothy Allison

    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.

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    Dorothy Allison

    Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.

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    Dorothy Allison

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

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    Dorothy Allison

    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.

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    Dorothy Allison

    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.

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    Dorothy Allison

    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.

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    Dorothy Allison

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

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    Dorothy Allison

    fiction is the great lie that tells the truth

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    Dorothy Allison

    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.

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    Dorothy Allison

    Gravy is the simplest, tastiest, most memory-laden dish I know how to make: a little flour, salt and pepper, crispy bits of whatever meat anchored the meal, a couple of cups of water or milk and slow stirring to break up lumps.

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    Dorothy Allison

    He never said "Don't tell your mama." He never had to say it. I did not know how to tell anyone what I felt, what scared me and shamed me... (109)

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    Dorothy Allison

    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.

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    Dorothy Allison

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

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    Dorothy Allison

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

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    Dorothy Allison

    I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people.

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    Dorothy Allison

    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.

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    Dorothy Allison

    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.

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    Dorothy Allison

    If you just go get one of these little fine arts degrees or writing program degrees, it never forces you to confront your responsibility as narrator, whereas any of the social sciences make you at look the interaction between the storyteller and story.

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    Dorothy Allison

    ...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.

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    Dorothy Allison

    I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.

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    Dorothy Allison

    I'm still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing.

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    Dorothy Allison

    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.

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    Dorothy Allison

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

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    Dorothy Allison

    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.

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    Dorothy Allison

    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.

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    Dorothy Allison

    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.

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    Dorothy Allison

    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.

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    Dorothy Allison

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

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    Dorothy Allison

    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.

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    Dorothy Allison

    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.

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    Dorothy Allison

    It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.

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    Dorothy Allison

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

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    Dorothy Allison

    I wanted her to to go on talking and understand without me saying anything. I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and take us away from him, to kill him if need be. (107)

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    Dorothy Allison

    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.

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    Dorothy Allison

    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.

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    Dorothy Allison

    I was born in 1949, and by the time I was 10, I figured out that my hope chest was not aimed in the same direction everybody else's was. And that life was going to be very, very complicated. And that I could either be provocative and declamatory, or shy, retiring and scared.

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    Dorothy Allison

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

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    Dorothy Allison

    I was no Cherokee. I was no warrior. I was nobody special. I was just a girl, scared and angry. When I saw myself in Daddy Glen's eyes, I wanted to die. No, I wanted to be already dead, cold and gone. Everything felt hopeless. He looked at me and I was ashamed of myself. It was like sliding down an endless hole, seeing myself at the bottom, dirty, ragged, poor, stupid.

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    Dorothy Allison

    Mama learned to laugh with them, before they could laugh at her, and to do it so well no one could be sure what she really thought or felt.

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    Dorothy Allison

    My heart broke all over again. I wanted my life back, my mama, but I knew I would never have that. The child I had been was gone with the child she had been. We were new people, and we didn't know each other anymore. I shook my head desperately.

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    Dorothy Allison

    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.

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    Dorothy Allison

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

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    Dorothy Allison

    People begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back.

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    Dorothy Allison

    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.

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    Dorothy Allison

    Piece by piece, my mother is being stolen from me.

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    Dorothy Allison

    she got a reputation for an easy smile and a sharp tongue, and using one to balance the other, she seemed friendly but distant