Dorothy Allison Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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 hereafter. I live in the here and now.

Dorothy Allison
For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength or something not human at all. Me, I told people, I take damage like a wall, a brick wall that never falls down, never feels anything, never flinches or remembers. I am one woman but I carry in my body all the stories I have ever been told, women I have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all.

Dorothy Allison
People become writers out of need, to create something they haven't found yet and, a little bit, to give something back.

Dorothy Allison
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
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
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
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.

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
My family's lives were not on television, not in books, not even comic books. There was a myth of the poor in this country, but it did not include us, no matter how hard I tried to squeeze us in. There was an idea of the good poor — hard-working, ragged but clean, and intrinsically honorable. I understood that we were the bad poor.

Dorothy Allison
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.

Dorothy Allison
Stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.

Dorothy Allison
Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.

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
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 was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats.

Dorothy Allison
I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.

Dorothy Allison
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
It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.

Dorothy Allison
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
It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.

Dorothy Allison
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
And while it is true that I got the best woman in the world, I don't think love saves you.

Dorothy Allison
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
It has seemed to me that literature, as I meant it, was embattled, that it was increasingly difficult to find writing doing what I thought literature should do — which was simply to push people into changing their ideas about the world, and to go further, to encourage us in the work of changing the world, to making it more just and more truly human.

Dorothy Allison
Hunger makes you restless. You dream about food—not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother's milk singing to your bloodstream.

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

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
I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people. Neither is anyone I have ever cared deeply about.

Dorothy Allison