Quotes by Dorothy Allison

“Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.”

“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.”

“Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that Id rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.”

“Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.”

“When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.”

“I think I would have died if there hadnt been the womens movement.”

“I tell my students you have an absolute right to write about people you know and love. You do. But the kicker is you have a responsibility to make the characters large enough that you will not have sinned against them.”

“When I saw him speak here before, I could look into the audience and see people who look like him laughing at things I didnt know the references to. There is an intimacy between Chicago writers and the population of this city that I find really wonderful. Its warm and its welcoming. Its a little like going to a Baptist church. They know when to say Amen.”

“Independent presses and bookstores give access to literature specific to a place. Readers can find stories they need.”

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

Write to your fear.

Why write stories? To join the conversation.

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

Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read -- something most important what I should not try to write.

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 peoples seemed real -- the lives I had read about in books.

It aint that you get religion. Religion gets you and then milks you dry. Wont let you drink a little whiskey. Wont let you make no fat-assed girls grin and giggle. Wont let you do a damn thing except work for what youll get in the hearafter. I live in the here and now.

Dont go taking that gospel stuff seriously. Its nice to clean you out now and then, but it aint for real. Its like bad whiskey. Run through you fast and leave you with pain.

What are you so angry about? my mother had asked me the last time I had gone home to visit.Why arent you more angry, I had wanted to ask her. But I couldnt talk to my mother that way. She understood that I did not want to live her life, to work as a waitress, until my toes curled in and my feet hurt all the time, to marry a man who would beat my children and treat me as if I had no right to object to object to anything he chose to do. She didnt want that life for me either. She wanted me happy and successful, to live unafraid among people who loved me, and to do things she had never been able to do and tell her all about them.So I told her, about the shelter, the magazine, readings and discussion groups. I told her about trying to write stories, though I hesitated to send send her all that I wrote. And there were far too many times when I would sit down to write my mama and stare at the paper unable to puzzle out how to explain how urgent and unimportant it was to change how womens lives were shaped. Not only that we should be paid equal money for equally difficult work, but that we should genuinely begin to think about what word we might choose to undertake, how we might live our daily lives. Why should I have to marry at all? Or explain myself if I chose to love a woman? Why could I not spend my hours writing stories instead of raising children or keeping house or working some deadly boring job just to cover the rent of an apartments where I was not safe anyway.

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different... from Two or Three Things i Know For Sure

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... Its 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.