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Dorothy Allison

Dorothy Allison Quotes

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Famous Dorothy Allison Quotes

“What are you so angry about?" my mother had asked me the last time I had gone home to visit. Why aren't you more angry, I had wanted to ask her. But I couldn't 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 didn't 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 women's 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.”

PoliticsFeminismEqualityGenderSexismForeword
Book:The Women's Room
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“The Sex Wars are over, I've been told, and it always makes me want to ask who won. But my sense of humor may be a little obscure to women who have never felt threatened by the way most lesbians use and mean the words "pervert" and "queer." I use the word queer to mean more than lesbian. Since I first used it in 1980 I have always meant it to imply that I am not only a lesbian but a transgressive lesbian -- femme, masochistic, as sexually aggressive as the women I seek out, and as pornographic in my imagination and sexual activities as the heterosexual hegemony has ever believed.”

QueerBdsmTransgressionHegemonyFemmeLesbianismQueernessPervertSex Wars
Book:Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature. SIGNED.
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“Everything I know, everything I put in my fiction, will hurt someone somewhere as surely as it will comfort and enlighten someone else. What then is my responsibility? What am I to restrain? What am I to fear and alter--my own nakedness or the grief of the reader? I want my stories to be so good they are unforgettable; to make my ideas live and my own terrors real for people I will never meet. It is a completely amoral writer's lust. If we begin to agree that some ideas are too dangerous, too bad to invite inside our heads, then we stop the storyteller completely. We silence everyone who would tell us something that might be painful in our vulnerable moments.”

FearHurtVulnerableEnlightenAmoral Lust
Author:Dorothy Allison
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“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.”

MenWritingFirstsMeanSaidHardStoriesYoungDiesGirlQualityFineAmountCreaturesGirlfriendDelicateLeisureHard ThingsSlenderDie YoungLeisure Time
Book:Two Or Three Things I Know for Sure
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“If I could have found what I needed at thirteen, I would not have lost so much of my life chasing vindication or death. Give some child, some thirteen-year old, the hope of the remade life. Tell the truth. Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you there is magic in it.”

IfsGivingWritingYearsChildrenStoriesFoundLostMagicNeededIf I CouldTelling The TruthSwearChasingThirteenVindicationThirteen Year Olds
Book:Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature
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“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.”

PeopleBelieveCommunityClassSecurityDependsHorrorRacismPrejudiceOppressionGood LifeBrutalRacism And Prejudice
Book:Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature
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“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.”

KnowsNeedsLongMadeShowsEyeRememberGrowsSinPathFineBlessingTestsCertaintyThis LifeHis EyesGood TimesQuestioningPointless
Book:Bastard Out of Carolina: A Novel
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“... 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”

HumansDoeSelfLyingSufferingEasyBecomingMoralityDestructionHatredExtraordinaryRefuseMythHopelessnessFlawedLifelongConditioningDespisedSelf Hatred
Book:Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature
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“I told her, Don't touch me that way. Don't come at me with that sour-cream smile. Come at me as if I were worth your life - the life we make together. Take me like a turtle whose shell must be cracked, whose heart is ice, who needs your heat. Love me like a warrior, sweat up to your earlobes and all your hope between your teeth. Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you have ever wanted.”

IfsKnowsWayNeedsHeartImportantWantedTogetherTeethIceWarriorHeatTake MeSweatShellsCreamCrackedSourTurtlesTouch Me
Author:Dorothy Allison
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“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.”

IfsWayNeedsHeartCharacterEmotionRevolutionaryTelling The TruthCensorshipNeed YouSlidesI Need YouBlockadesEat Your Heart
Book:Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature
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“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.”

EyeWantedDiesGirlFeltPoorGoneSawsSeeingSpecialStupidColdAngryBottomScaredEndlessHolesWarriorDirtyAshamedHopelessDaddyRaggedCherokeeJust A GirlWanted To Die
Book:Bastard Out of Carolina: A Novel
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