Dorothy Allison Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

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 am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.

Dorothy Allison
Literature is the lie that tells the truth...

Dorothy Allison
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
I put on the page a third look at what I've seen in life — the reinvented experience of a cross-eyed working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine.

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
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
One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.

Dorothy Allison
I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river.

Dorothy Allison
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
Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.

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
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
Babies change things, open doors you thought were shut, close others. Make you into something you never been.

Dorothy Allison
Fiction never exceeds the reach of the writer's courage. The best fiction comes from the place where the terror hides, the edge of our worst stuff.

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
My life has been saved over and over again by picking up a book in which someone captured the whole experience of being despised and not dying.

Dorothy Allison
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
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.

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