Dorothy Allison - Books Quotes

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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

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

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