Bastard Out of Carolina Quotes

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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, Bastard Out of Carolina

“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

“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

“I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. (253)”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“For that is of course what it means to read a novel and live in it for a while. You are viscerally inside someone else’s reality. You feel and understand things you have not known before, and that is both scary and exhilarating. The world becomes more clear, reality more vivid, and your own experience larger.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“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, Bastard Out of Carolina

“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, 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

“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

“No lies, I thought, but lots of stories. True stories. True lies. Powerful stories, heroic tales, and cautionary fables.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“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, Bastard Out of Carolina

“I swear this family’s got shit for brains.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“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, Bastard Out of Carolina

“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, Bastard Out of Carolina

“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, Bastard Out of Carolina

“Once I was born, her hopes had turned and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“I wanted, I wanted, I wanted something–Jesus or God or orange-blossom scent or dark chocolate terror in my throat.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“Language can carry us past the horror to the sense of purpose in a life that refuses to surrender to that darkness.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“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, Bastard Out of Carolina

“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, Bastard Out of Carolina