Skin Quotes

“I wanted to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. I wanted to run away from who we had been seen to be, who we had been... It's the first thing I think of when trouble comes - the geographic solution. Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over. What hides behind that impulse is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, is valueless, better off abandoned, that running away is easier than trying to change things, that change itself is not possible.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class And Literature

“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

“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

“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, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“I tell myself that life is the long struggle to understand and love fully. That to keep faith with those who have literally saved my life and made it possible for me to imagine more than survival, I have to try constantly to understand more, love more fully, go more naked in order to make others as safe as I myself want to be. I want to live past my own death, as my mother does, in what I have made possible for others—my sisters, my son, my lover, my community—the people I believe in absolutely, men and women whom death does not stop, who honor the truth of each other’s stories.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class And Literature

“You need to know that you are a real person, that this thing happening to you is not something you are making happen—because when I was a child I thought I was doing it. I thought that if only I were a little better, a little smarter, a little meaner, a little faster, or maybe even a better Christian, none of those terrible things would be happening.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“Maybe not for anyone else, but for me, the kind of person I am, writing meant an attempt to sneak up on the truth, to figure it out slowly through the characters on the page.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“Every time I sit down to write, I have a great fear that anything I write will reveal me as the monster I was always told I would be, but that fear is personal, something I must face in everything I do, every act I contemplate.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“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, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class And Literature

“Sex was dangerous, a trap, trashy as drinking whiskey in a paper cup or telling dirty stories in a loud whisper. Sex was a sure sign of having nothing better to hope for.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“Romantic love continues the status quo in which we both are victimized and victimize each other.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“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, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“I do not want to claim a safe and comfortable life for myself that is purchased at the cost of some other woman’s needs or desires.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“Shulamith Firestone”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“I grew up poor, hated, the victim of physical, emotional, and sexual violence, and I know that suffering does not ennoble. It destroys.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“By the time that poem became the story “River of Names,”* I had made the decision to reverse that process: to claim my family, my true history, and to tell the truth not only about who I was but about the temptation to lie.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“What I have tried to do in my own life is refuse the language and categories that would reduce me to less than my whole complicated experience”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“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, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“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. It is a belief that dominates this culture. It is what makes the poor whites of the South so determinedly racist and the middle class so contemptuous of the poor.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“I passed whole portions of my life—days, months, years—in pure directed progress, getting up every morning and setting to work, working so hard and so continually that I avoided examining in any way what I knew about my life. Busywork became a trance state. I ignored who I really was and how I became that person, continued in that daily progress, became an automaton who was what she did.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“You got to hold still, I thought. Perfectly still. I concentrated, focused, felt my arms become rigid, stern and strong. I pulled back the trigger slowly, squeezing steadily. The bottle exploded, water shooting out in a wide fine spray. ‘Goddamn!’ Anne shouted. She was staring at me like I had stared at her earlier, her whole face open with pride and delight. Sexy, yeah. I pointed the barrel at the sky and let my mouth widen into a smile. ‘Goddamn,’ I said, and meant it with all my heart.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class And Literature

“The holy act of sex, my sex, done in your name, done for the only, the best reason. Because we want it.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“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, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“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, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“The private stories I made up for my own enjoyment tended toward the creation of slightly scary and definitely inhuman erotic machinery: androids who would do only what their programming commanded, or machines into which one could fit one’s naked and tender flesh without fear of any intrusion by the banally human. The conditioned fearfulness of a terrorized and dependent girlhood led me away from imagining any actual human sexual contact with other fearful, or possibly dangerous, humans like myself.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“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, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“that the biggest part of the struggle as a child is about trying to believe you are not the monster you are being told you are. You need to know that you are a real person, that this thing happening to you is not something you are making happen—because when I was a child I thought I was doing it. I thought that if only I were a little better, a little smarter, a little meaner, a little faster, or maybe even a better Christian, none of those terrible things would be happening.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“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, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature

“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, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature