Top 140 Dorothy Allison Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The boys would quit school and sooner or later go to jail for something silly. I might not quit school, not while Mama had any say in the matter, but what difference would that make? What was I going to do in five years? Work in the textile mill? Join Mama at the diner? It all looked bleak to me. No wonder people got crazy as they grew up.”

— Dorothy Allison

52. “I can’t write what I don’t believe in.”

— Dorothy Allison

53. “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

54. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

55. “Books can offer a counter narrative – another story to the one we think we know. Story is told in a voice. The voice of Bastard Out of Carolina is that of a young girl who has just lost her mother and her sense of any real hope or justice. You don’t know who she is until the story ends, and I always intended for the ending to make the reader angry.”

— Dorothy Allison

56. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

57. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

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

— Dorothy Allison

59. “Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs.”

— Dorothy Allison

60. “It is so hard to be a girl and want what you have never had. To be a child and want what you cannot imagine. To look at women and think, Nobody else, nobody else has ever wanted to do what I want to do. Hard to be innocent, believing yourself evil. Hard to think no one else in the history of the world wants to do this. Hard to find out that they do, but not with you. Or not in quite the way you want them to do it.”

— Dorothy Allison

61. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

62. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

63. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

64. “I claimed myself and remade my life.”

— Dorothy Allison

65. “I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination to shape a life, and create a literature, that was not a lie.”

— Dorothy Allison

66. “We had all wanted the simplest thing, to love and be loved and be safe together, but we had lost it and I didn’t know how to get it back.”

— Dorothy Allison

67. “Shame comes with denial. Fear fattens on lies.”

— Dorothy Allison

68. “Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you have ever wanted.”

— Dorothy Allison

69. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

70. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

71. “I passed whole portions of my life – days, months, years – in pure directed progress, getting up every morning and setting to work, working so hard and so continually that I avoided examining in any way what I knew about my life. Busywork became a trance state. I ignored who I really was and how I became that person, continued in that daily progress, became an automaton who was what she did.”

— Dorothy Allison

72. “Shulamith Firestone.”

— Dorothy Allison

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

— Dorothy Allison

74. “You need to know that you are a real person, that this thing happening to you is not something you are making happen – because when I was a child I thought I was doing it. I thought that if only I were a little better, a little smarter, a little meaner, a little faster, or maybe even a better Christian, none of those terrible things would be happening.”

— Dorothy Allison

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

— Dorothy Allison

76. “There is a difference between fiction and nonfiction deeper than technique or intention. I value both but genuinely believe that fiction can tell a larger truth.”

— Dorothy Allison

77. “I made my life, the same way it looks like you’re gonna make yours – out of pride and stubbornness and too much anger. You better think hard, Ruth Anne, about what you want and who you’re mad at. You better think hard.”

— Dorothy Allison

78. “Every time I sit down to write, I have a great fear that anything I write will reveal me as the monster I was always told I would be, but that fear is personal, something I must face in everything I do, every act I contemplate.”

— Dorothy Allison

79. “Maybe not for anyone else, but for me, the kind of person I am, writing meant an attempt to sneak up on the truth, to figure it out slowly through the characters on the page.”

— Dorothy Allison

80. “Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read – something most important what I should not try to write.”

— Dorothy Allison

81. “I want the society in which I live to be clear about the reality of our families; to know all the ways in which we avoid the issues of violence, abuse, and societal contempt; and to see survivors as more than victims. If we know more about what it means to survive abuse, we will be better able to help those still caught in the whole shameful secret world of physical and sexual violence.”

— Dorothy Allison

82. “Moreover, just as I was terrified of addressing my own racism, so, too, other women were afraid of stepping into the deep and messy waters of class and sexual desire. If we get into this, what might we lose? If we expose this, what might our enemies do with it? And what might it mean? Will we have to throw out all the theory we have built with such pain and struggle? Will we have to start over? How are we going to try to make each other safe while we work it through?”

— Dorothy Allison

83. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

84. “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. It is a belief that dominates this culture. It is what makes the poor whites of the South so determinedly racist and the middle class so contemptuous of the poor.”

— Dorothy Allison

85. “What’s the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.”

— Dorothy Allison

86. “Whatever magic Jesus’ grace promised, I didn’t feel it.”

— Dorothy Allison

87. “They looked young, even Nevil, who’d had his teeth knocked out, while the aunts – Ruth, Raylene, Alma, and even Mama – seemed old, worn-down, and slow, born to mother, nurse, and clean up after the men.”

— Dorothy Allison

88. “I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, in the way other people’s seemed real – the lives I had read about in books.”

— Dorothy Allison

89. “The rage was a good feeling, stronger and purer than the shame that followed, the fear and the sudden urge to run and hide, to deny, to pretend I did not know who I was and what the world would do to me.”

— Dorothy Allison

90. “When the men at the counter weren’t slipping quarters in her pocket they were bringing her things, souvenirs or friendship cards, once or twice a ring. Mama smiled, joked, slapped ass, and firmly passed back anything that looked like a down payment on something she didn’t want to sell.”

— Dorothy Allison

91. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

92. “If we are forced to talk about our lives, our sexuality, and our work only in the language and categories of a society that despises us, eventually we will be unable to speak past our own griefs. We will disappear into those categories. What I have tried to do in my own life is refuse the language and categories that would reduce me to less than my whole complicated experience.”

— Dorothy Allison

93. “Why write stories? To join the conversation.”

— Dorothy Allison

94. “I do not want to claim a safe and comfortable life for myself that is purchased at the cost of some other woman’s needs or desires.”

— Dorothy Allison

95. “What I have tried to do in my own life is refuse the language and categories that would reduce me to less than my whole complicated experience.”

— Dorothy Allison

96. “You are trying to put something on the page worth what it costs you to put it on the page.”

— Dorothy Allison

97. “I say, “Talk to me. Tell me who you are, what you want, what you’ve never had, the story you’ve always been afraid to tell.”

— Dorothy Allison

98. “The reality is that for many of us family was as much the incubator of despair as the safe nurturing.”

— Dorothy Allison

99. “Who had Mama been, what had she wanted to be or do before I was born? Once I was born, her hopes had turned, and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun.”

— Dorothy Allison

100. “Essential political decisions are made not once, but again and again in a variety of situations, always against that pressure to compromise, to bargain.”

— Dorothy Allison