Quotes by Dorothy Allison

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

“I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination to shape a life, and create a literature, that was not a lie.”

“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 unders...”

“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...”

“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, ...”

“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... It's the first thing I t...”

“It ain't that you get religion. Religion gets you and then milks you dry. Won't let you drink a little whiskey. Won't let you make no fat-assed girls grin and giggle. Won't let you do a damn thing ...”

“Don't go taking that gospel stuff seriously. It's nice to clean you out now and then, but it ain't for real. It's like bad whiskey. Run through you fast and leave you with pain.”

“Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.”

“Can a book make such a difference? Can it change you utterly?I know it can.(First essay from The Book That Changed My Life, edited by Roxanne J. Coady & Joy Johannessen)”

“I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening ...”

“I made my life, the same way it looks like you're gonna make yoursout of pride and stubbornness and too much anger. You better think hard, Ruth Anne, about what you want and who you're mad at. You ...”

“My family of friends has kept me alive through lovers who have left, enterprises that have failed, and all too many stories that never got finished. That family has been part of remaking the world ...”

“If you just go get one of these little fine arts degrees or writing program degrees, it never forces you to confront your responsibility as narrator, whereas any of the social sciences make you at ...”

“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 a...”

“Women.Lord God, I used to follow these girls. THey would come at me, those girls who were not really girls anymore. Grown up, wounded, hurt and terrible. Pained and desperate. Mean and angry. Hungr...”