quotes by Dorothy Allison

"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

"Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning."
— Dorothy Allison

"Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me."
— Dorothy Allison

"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

"Change, when it comes, cracks everything open."
— Dorothy Allison

"Everything that comes to us is a blessing or a test. That’s all you need to know in this life…just the certainty that God’s got His eye on you, that He knows what you are made of, what you need to grow on. Why,questioning’s a sin, it’s pointless. He will show you your path in His own good time. And long as I remember that, I’m fine."
— Dorothy Allison (Bastard Out of Carolina)

"I told her, Don't touch me that way. Don't come at me with that sour-cream smile. Come at me as if I were worth your life.... 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

"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

"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

"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 (Bastard Out of Carolina)

"fiction is the great lie that tells the truth"
— Dorothy Allison

"Write to your fear."
— Dorothy Allison

"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 (Bastard Out of Carolina)

"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 (Bastard Out of Carolina)

"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 (Bastard Out of Carolina)

"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 (Bastard Out of Carolina)

"... suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us extraordinary"
— Dorothy Allison

"Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.
"
— Dorothy Allison

"I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them.

"
— Dorothy Allison

""Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different..." from Two or Three Things i Know For Sure"
— Dorothy Allison

"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 (Trash)

"“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 (Two or Three Things I Know for Sure)

"I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats."
— Dorothy Allison (Two or Three Things I Know for Sure)

"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 (Cavedweller: A Novel)