Dorothy Allison - People Quotes

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

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

Dorothy Allison