Dorothy Allison Quotes
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.
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.
I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.
One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.
Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.
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.
I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.
When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.
Babies change things, open doors you thought were shut, close others. Make you into something you never been.
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.
I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way.
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.
Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.
Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different..." from Two or Three Things i Know For Sure
Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.
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.
And while it is true that I got the best woman in the world, I don't think love saves you.
I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats.
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)
That was what gospel was meant to do - make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified.
...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.
People begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back.
Every kid I meet who's a reader has got something like that, their fantasy world. And science fiction is the best, especially for girls because it's the one place where you can do the forbidden.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.
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)
