Top 93 Dorothy Allison Quotes
#3. I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people.
Dorothy Allison
#4. People want biography. People want memoir. They want you to tell them that the story you're telling them is true. The thing I'm telling you is true, but it did not always happen to me.
Dorothy Allison
#6. Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different ... I claimed myself and remade my life. Only when I knew I belonged to myself completely did I become capable of giving myself to another, of finding joy in desire, pleasure in our love, power in this body no one else owns.
Dorothy Allison
#7. Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.
Dorothy Allison
#9. My sisters, we didn't like each other as kids. We were scared of each other, I think, but we've grown to love each other. It was fun to write about these sisters who were supposed to hate each other but really don't.
Dorothy Allison
#10. Never give anyone the satisfaction of denying you something you need, and for that, what you have to do is to learn to need nothing. Starve the wanting part of you.
Dorothy Allison,
"Mama"
Trash
Dorothy Allison
#11. 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
#12. It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.
Dorothy Allison
#13. I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.
Dorothy Allison
#14. 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.
Dorothy Allison
#15. When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.
Dorothy Allison
#16. I think it's wonderful that people in pickup trucks are buying two flats of dog food and a copy of 'Bastard.' I want my view of the world to be right up there next to gallon boxes of Tide.
Dorothy Allison
#17. I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. (253)
Dorothy Allison
#18. 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
#19. 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)
Dorothy Allison
#20. Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe.
Dorothy Allison
#21. Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.
Dorothy Allison
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. No one knew she cried in the night for Lyle and her lost happiness, that under that biscuit crust exterior she was all butter grief and hunger.
Dorothy Allison
#26. I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.
Dorothy Allison
#27. I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.
Dorothy Allison
#28. And while it is true that I got the best woman in the world, I don't think love saves you.
Dorothy Allison
#29. 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
#30. It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.
Dorothy Allison
#31. 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
#32. My assumption when I began writing was that you were never going to make any money. And you were never going to reach everyone. Therefore you had to do as much as you could in the service of something you genuinely believed in. And if you do that and people get upset, well, there you go.
Dorothy Allison
#33. You are trying to put something on the page worth what it costs you to put it on the page.
Dorothy Allison
#34. he had never imagined she would leave him for messing around with girls he would never have married and didn't love.
Dorothy Allison
#35. Can a book make such a difference? Can it change you utterly?
I know it can.
(First essay from The Book That Changed My Life, edited by Roxanne J. Coady & Joy Johannessen)
Dorothy Allison
#38. One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.
Dorothy Allison
#40. I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.
Dorothy Allison
#41. We wanted a feminist revolution. I wanted it like a lover. I wanted it like justice.
Dorothy Allison
#42. 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.
Dorothy Allison
#43. 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
#44. People don't do right because of the fear of God or love of him. You do the right thing because the world doesn't make sense if you don't. (145)
Dorothy Allison
#45. Stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.
Dorothy Allison
#47. 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
#48. People begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back.
Dorothy Allison
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Babies change things, open doors you thought were shut, close others. Make you into something you never been.
Dorothy Allison
#57. 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
#58. I am the woman who lost herself but now is found, the lesbian, outside the law of the church and man, the one who has to love herself or die. If you are not as strong as I am, what will be make together? I am all muscle and wounded desire, and I need to know how strong we both can be.
Dorothy Allison
#59. 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
#60. 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.
Dorothy Allison
#61. 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
#62. Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.
Dorothy Allison
#63. 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)
Dorothy Allison
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child - one who sometimes asks me for stories of my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I have worked to make sure of that.
Dorothy Allison
#67. She got a reputation for an easy smile and a sharp tongue, and using one to balance the other, she seemed friendly but distant
Dorothy Allison
#68. What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.
Dorothy Allison
#70. 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
#71. When I finally let someone into my narrow bed, the first thing I told her was what I could not do. I said, I can't fix it, girl. I can't fix anything. If you don't as me to fix it, you can ask anything else. If you can say what you need, I'll try to give it to you.
Dorothy Allison
#72. 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
#73. The worst thing in the world was the way I felt when I wanted us to be like the families in the books in the library, when I just wanted Daddy Glen to love me like the father in Robinson Crusoe. (209)
Dorothy Allison
#74. I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats.
Dorothy Allison
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#80. Once I was born, her hopes had turned and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun
Dorothy Allison
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Where story comes from, I don't know. I know that I become obsessed with something. An idea, an image, a person, the way a person talks. And then something starts happening that I can't explain, and it has a lot to do with language.
Dorothy Allison
#85. The hardest thing to teach young writers is that it's wonderful to tell your truth. And that's what you should do. But it damn well better be beautiful.
Dorothy Allison
#86. 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.
Dorothy Allison
#87. If you write a book that's as powerful and successful as 'Bastard,' there's a strong desire to prove there's something else.
Dorothy Allison
#88. Fiction is the great liar that tells the truth about how the world really lives.
Dorothy Allison
#89. 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
#90. If somebody gave you several thousand dollars and nothin' to do but write, would you be a writer then? Would you tell your stories, your family's stories, then?
Dorothy Allison
#91. 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
#92. He loves her like a gambler loves a fast racehorse or a desperate man loves whiskey. That kind of love eats a man up.
Dorothy Allison
#93. 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
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