Top 150 Dorothy Allison Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “I had to say to her that it isn’t just men, and it isn’t just men “like that.”

— Dorothy Allison

103. “I’ll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.”

— Dorothy Allison

104. “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

105. “Romantic love continues the status quo in which we both are victimized and victimize each other.”

— Dorothy Allison

106. “Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.”

— Dorothy Allison

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

— Dorothy Allison

108. “When my mama was twenty-five she already had an old woman’s hands, and I feared them. I did not know then what it was that scared me so. I’ve come to understand since that it was the thought of her growing old, of her dying and leaving me alone. I feared those brown spots, those wrinkles and cracks that lined her wrists, ankles, and the soft shadowed sides of her eyes.”

— Dorothy Allison

109. “The best fiction comes from the place where the terror hides, the edge of our worst stuff. I believe, absolutely, that if you do not break out in that swear of fear when you write, then you have not gone far enough.”

— Dorothy Allison

110. “We wanted a feminist revolution. I wanted it like a lover. I wanted it like justice.”

— Dorothy Allison

111. “I had to say to her that it isn’t just men, and it isn’t just men “like that.” I had to talk to her about the women I had found after I left home, women who breathed out hatred as steadily as the worst man we had ever known. I had to say that the world is a bigger, meaner, more complicated place than anyone ever told us, and the tools for dealing with it are real, but we have to invent them for ourselves, make them up as we go along.”

— Dorothy Allison

112. “As I was finishing the copyediting of Bastard, I found myself thinking about all I had read when Kate Millett published Flying: her stated conviction that telling the truth was what feminist writers were supposed to do. That telling the truth – your side of it anyway, knowing that there were truths other than your own – was a moral act, a courageous act, an act of rebellion that would encourage other such acts.”

— Dorothy Allison

113. “I shook my head once and caught her glance, the wise and sullen look of a not quite adolescent girl who knew too much.”

— Dorothy Allison

114. “Look around you. Apartheid is being dismantled and Nelson Mandela walks the streets of South Africa. Until a few years ago, I could not imagine that happening. Russia is a new place, so is China. The communist bogeyman I was threatened with throughout my childhood is gone. The world is no less dangerous, and people are still dying for their origins, beliefs, color, and sexuality, but I find myself full of startled awe and hope. The rigid world into which I was born has been shaken profoundly.”

— Dorothy Allison

115. “I might not have ever had the courage to write those stories without that experience, that training ground in how to look at one’s own life and see it as a story.”

— Dorothy Allison

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

— Dorothy Allison

117. “Half asleep in the sun, reassured by the familiar smell of frying fat, I’d make promises to God. If only He’d let me be a singer! I knew I’d probably turn to whiskey and rock ’n’ roll like they all did, but not for years, I promised. Not for years, Lord. Not till I had glorified His name and bought Mama a yellow Cadillac and a house on Old Henderson Road.”

— Dorothy Allison

118. “After the last ruling, Stephen King and his wife, Tabitha King, bought copies of Bastard Out of Carolina for many of the libraries in the state – a gesture I appreciated more than I could ever express.”

— Dorothy Allison

119. “She was an actress in the theater of true life.”

— Dorothy Allison

120. “Growing up was like falling into a hole.”

— Dorothy Allison

121. “The world is a new place, but it still needs to be remade. We still need revolutionaries.”

— Dorothy Allison

122. “Both of us had grown up believing that being beaten is normal, that being backhanded is ordinary, that being called names is a regular part of life. That everyone does it, that they just don’t talk about it in public.”

— Dorothy Allison

123. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

124. “She was an actress in the theater of true life, so good that no one suspected what was hidden behind the artfully applied makeup and carefully pinned hairnet.”

— Dorothy Allison

125. “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.”

— Dorothy Allison

126. “The things you hesitate to talk about,” Bertha repeated in her husky North Carolina accent, “those are the things you should be writing about.”

— Dorothy Allison

127. “Yes, somewhere inside me there is a child always eleven years old, a girlchild who holds the world responsible for all the things that terrify and call to me. But inside me too is the teenager who armed herself and fought back, the dyke who did what she had to, the woman who learned to love without giving in to fear.”

— Dorothy Allison

128. “Asking “what if” and answering that question is the bedrock of what the novel can achieve. The story becomes something more than one person’s perspective – it reaches as far as the novelist can imagine.”

— Dorothy Allison

129. “It was death Aunt Ruth was thinking about all the time. Death was the reason she had talked so much, so intently, death was the fire burning her up. With every breath and laugh and wiped-away tear, she had been dying.”

— Dorothy Allison

130. “If it’s true, I have the absolute right to terrify you with it.”

— Dorothy Allison

131. “It was not only that false biographies tended to overshadow true ones, they obscured a hard fact that all fiction writers know – which is simply that real life is far less believable than fiction. That is in fact part of the power of nonfiction narratives. To take details from “real life” into fiction and make them believable requires careful work: creating characters the reader can believe would do the unbelievable and setting up a scene where those events make some kind of sense.”

— Dorothy Allison

132. “Anything.” I loved the way she said that. Granny’s “Christian women” came out like new spit on a dusty morning, pure and precious and deeply satisfying.”

— Dorothy Allison

133. “Take them as letters from a battleground more mythic than remembered, and use them to figure out who you are and what you might become.”

— Dorothy Allison

134. “The books still weren’t real, but maybe they were written about city women, television women, Yankee women – just about as strange as Zeus had always been and Jesus was getting to be.”

— Dorothy Allison

135. “I wanted the way I felt to mean something and for everything in my life to change because of it.”

— Dorothy Allison

136. “My stories are not against anyone; they are for the life we need.”

— Dorothy Allison

137. “I found in myself the heroine of every heartbreak song I had ever laughed at but played again.”

— Dorothy Allison

138. “What I loved were books that heightened the sense of life’s wonders without denying the complexity and horror that sometimes accompanied those wonders.”

— Dorothy Allison

139. “No lies, I thought, but lots of stories. True stories. True lies. Powerful stories, heroic tales, and cautionary fables.”

— Dorothy Allison

140. “Simple answers, reductionist politics, are the most prone to compromise, to saying we’re addressing the essential issue and all that other stuff can slide. It is, in reality, people who slide.”

— Dorothy Allison

141. “If we are not to sacrifice some part of ourselves or our community, we will have to go through the grief, the fear of exposure, and struggle, with only a thin layer of trust that we will emerge whole and unbroken. I know of no other way to do this than to start by saying, I will give up nothing. I will give up no one.”

— Dorothy Allison

142. “I became convinced that to survive I would have to remake the world so that it came closer to matching its own ideals.”

— Dorothy Allison

143. “In lyric, in epic tale, in stubborn retelling of what happened, or did not happen, but should have happened, or still might – we live past ourselves and those we have lost but can never lose.”

— Dorothy Allison

144. “Greenville, South Carolina, in 1955 was the most beautiful place in the world. Black walnut trees dropped their green-black fuzzy bulbs on Aunt Ruth’s matted lawn, past where their knotty roots rose up out of the ground like the elbows and knees of dirty children suntanned dark and covered with scars. Weeping willows marched across the yard, following every wandering stream and ditch, their long whiplike fronds making tents that sheltered sweet-smelling beds of clover.”

— Dorothy Allison

145. “That was what my book was about – telling a story that made sense of what did not make sense, and telling it plainly enough that anyone who wanted to could point to it and say “that’s my story.” A man in a Peterbilt cap or a teenage girl with her hair down in her eyes.”

— Dorothy Allison

146. “The stories I made up for myself changed. In the half-sleep that preceded full sleep I began to imagine the highway that went north. No real road, this highway was shadowed by tall grass and ancient trees. Moss hung low and tiny birds with gray-blue wings darted from the road’s edge to the trees.”

— Dorothy Allison

147. “I had imagined that, reading Bone’s story, a girl like her would see what I intended – that being made the object of someone else’s contempt and rage did not make you contemptible. I was arguing against the voice that had told me I was a monster – at five, nine, and fifteen. I was arguing for the innocence and worth of that child – I who had never believed in my own innocence.”

— Dorothy Allison

148. “The women who hate me hate their insistent desires, their fat lusts swallowed and hidden, disciplined to nothing narrowed to bone and dry hot dreams.”

— Dorothy Allison

149. “I believed in the worth of biography and even of ethnography, but I believed more powerfully in the reach of a well-told narrative that set out to pull the reader into the life of that child I had not been. I did not want to relate what had happened to me.”

— Dorothy Allison

150. “I wanted, I wanted, I wanted something–Jesus or God or orange-blossom scent or dark chocolate terror in my throat.”

— Dorothy Allison