Dorothy Allison > Quotes

“Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.”
― 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

“Write to your fear.”
― Dorothy Allison

“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, Bastard Out of Carolina

“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

“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

“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

“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.

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, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

“... 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

“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

“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, Trash

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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, Bastard Out of Carolina

“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, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

“I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.”
― Dorothy Allison, Trash

“Why write stories? To join the conversation.”
― Dorothy Allison, Trash

“I have lived my life in pursuit of the remade world...

I believe in truth. I believe in truth denied any use of it can believe in it. I know its power. I know the threat it represents to a world constructed on lies.

I know the myths of the family that thread through our society's literature, music, politics - and I know the reality. The reality is that for many of us family was as much the incubator of despair as the safe nurturing haven the myths promised... But I also believe in hope...

The worst thing done to us in the name of a civilized society is to label the truth of our lives material outside the legitimate subject matter of serious writers...

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. The only hope you have, the only hope any of us has, is the remade life.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

“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

“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

“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, 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

“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, Bastard Out of Carolina

“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, Bastard Out of Carolina

“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, Bastard Out of Carolina

“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

“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, Trash

“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, Trash

“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

“We all nourish truth with our tongues
not in sour-batter words that never take shape
nor line-driven stories bent to skirt the edge
of our great exhaustion, desire, and doubt.
We all use simply the words of our own lives
to say what we really want,
to lie spent on our lovers,
put teeth to all we hate,
to strain the juice of our history
between what has been allowed
and what has always been denied,
the active desire to take hold of the root.”
― Dorothy Allison, The Women Who Hate Me Poetry 1980-1990

“I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. (253)”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“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, Bastard Out of Carolina

“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, Trash

“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, Trash

“And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained.
And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.”
― Dorothy Allison, Trash