Top 140 Dorothy Allison Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Dorothy Allison

2. “Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.”

— Dorothy Allison

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Dorothy Allison

4. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

5. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

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

— Dorothy Allison

7. “I think I would have died if there hadn’t been the women’s movement.”

— Dorothy Allison

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

— Dorothy Allison

9. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

10. “I have a terrible memory.”

— Dorothy Allison

11. “It’s important to set challenges that you’re not sure you’re equal to.”

— Dorothy Allison

12. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

13. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

14. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

15. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

16. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

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

— Dorothy Allison

18. “Stories open the door to the darkened room. Language can carry us past the horror to the sense of purpose in a life that refuses to surrender to that darkness.”

— Dorothy Allison

19. “Books can offer a counter narrative – another story to the one we think we know.”

— Dorothy Allison

20. “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones.”

— Dorothy Allison

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

— Dorothy Allison

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

22. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

23. “I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself.”

— Dorothy Allison

24. “Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.”

— Dorothy Allison

25. “Life ain’t the movies.”

— Dorothy Allison

26. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

27. “For that is of course what it means to read a novel and live in it for a while. You are viscerally inside someone else’s reality. You feel and understand things you have not known before, and that is both scary and exhilarating. The world becomes more clear, reality more vivid, and your own experience larger.”

— Dorothy Allison

28. “I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people.”

— Dorothy Allison

29. “Men could do anything, and everything they did, no matter how violent or mistaken, was viewed with humor and understanding. The sheriff would lock them up for shooting out each other’s windows, or racing their pickups down the railroad tracks, or punching out the bartender over at the Rhythm Ranch, and my aunts would shrug and make sure the children were all right at home. What men did was just what men did. Some days I would grind my teeth, wishing I had been born a boy.”

— Dorothy Allison

30. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

31. “She blushed. I love it when women blush, especially those big butch girls who know you want them. And I wanted her. I did. I wanted her. But she was a difficult woman, wouldn’t let me give her a backrub, read her palm, or sew up the tear in her jeans – all those ritual techniques Southern femmes have employed in the seduction of innocent butch girls.”

— Dorothy Allison

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

— Dorothy Allison

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

— Dorothy Allison

34. “I am not here to make anyone happy. What I am here for is to claim my life, my mama’s death, our losses and our triumphs, to name them for myself.”

— Dorothy Allison

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

— Dorothy Allison

36. “I believe in the remade life, the possibilities inherent in our lesbian and gay chosen families, our families of friends and lovers, the healing that can take place among the most wounded of us. My family of friends has kept me alive through lovers who have left, enterprises that have failed, and all too many stories that never got finished. That family has been part of remaking the world for me.”

— Dorothy Allison

37. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

38. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

39. “I would imagine being tied up and put in a haystack while someone put the dry, stale straw ablaze. I would picture it perfectly while rocking on my hand. The daydream was about struggling to get free while the fire burned hotter and closer. I am not sure if I came when the fire reached me or after I had imagined escaping it. But I came. I orgasmed on my hand to the dream of fire.”

— Dorothy Allison

40. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

41. “It’s fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.”

— Dorothy Allison

Featured in: Fun Quotes

42. “The women I loved most in the world horrified me. I did not want to grow up to be them.”

— Dorothy Allison

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

— Dorothy Allison

44. “Every writing course I ever heard of said the same thing. Take one story, follow it through, beginning, middle, end. I don’t do that. I never do. 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.”

— Dorothy Allison

45. “Let me tell you a story. I tell stories to prove I was meant to survive, knowing it is not true.”

— Dorothy Allison

46. “Once I was born, her hopes had turned and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun.”

— Dorothy Allison

47. “People pay for that they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And the pay for it simply: by the lives they lead. – James Baldwin.”

— Dorothy Allison

48. “The bottom line is I’m writing to save the dead. I’m writing to save the people I have lost, some of whose bodies are still walking around.”

— Dorothy Allison

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

— Dorothy Allison

50. “I grew up poor, hated, the victim of physical, emotional, and sexual violence, and I know that suffering does not ennoble. It destroys.”

— Dorothy Allison