“Both of us had grown up believing that being beaten is normal, that being backhanded is ordinary, that being called names is… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life. — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
I was born in 1949, and by the time I was 10, I figured out that my hope chest was not aimed… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
“In the worst moments of my life, I have told myself that story, the story about a girl who stood up to… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
“Stories open the door to the darkened room. Language can carry us past the horror to the sense of purpose in a… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
“What I loved were books that heightened the sense of life’s wonders without denying the complexity and horror that sometimes accompanied those… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
My heart broke all over again. I wanted my life back, my mama, but I knew I would never have that. The… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
“I have lived my life in pursuit of the remade world... I believe in truth. I believe in truth denied any use… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
Everything that comes to us is a blessing or a test. That’s all you need to know in this life…just the certainty… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means. — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
“I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
I'm still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
“take details from “real life” into fiction and make them believable requires careful work: creating characters the reader can believe would do… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different...I claimed myself and remade my life. Only when I knew I… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
If I could have found what I needed at thirteen, I would not have lost so much of my life chasing vindication… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
“Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
my life has been saved over and over again by picking up a book in which someone captured the whole experience of… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
“I do not want to claim a safe and comfortable life for myself that is purchased at the cost of some other… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
“Once I was born, her hopes had turned and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun” — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
“What I have tried to do in my own life is refuse the language and categories that would reduce me to less… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
“My stories are not against anyone; they are for the life we need.” — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
she got a reputation for an easy smile and a sharp tongue, and using one to balance the other, she seemed friendly but distant — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
“Simple answers, reductionist politics, are the most prone to compromise, to saying we’re addressing the essential issue and all that other stuff can slide.… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
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… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
“I had to say to her that it isn’t just men, and it isn’t just men “like that.” I had to talk to her… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
“Entitlement, I have told them, is a matter of feeling like we rather than they.” — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
“Love was something I would not have to worry about - the whole mystery of love, heartbreak songs, and family legends. Women who pined,… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
“Behind the story I tell is the one I don't. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
Hunger makes you restless. you dream about food - not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring,… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
I think I would have died if there hadn't been the women's movement. It gave me a vision that I could do something different,… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
People begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back. — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
The hardest thing to teach young writers is that it's wonderful to tell your truth. And that's what you should do. But it damn… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
“The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends… — Dorothy Allison Copy Share Image
