Dorothy Allison

“I became convinced that to survive I would have to remake the world so that it came closer to matching its own…

— Dorothy Allison

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

— Dorothy Allison

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other,…

— Dorothy Allison

Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each…

— Dorothy Allison

“The reality is that for many of us family was as much the incubator of despair as the safe nurturing”

— Dorothy Allison

“The women I loved most in the world horrified me. I did not want to grow up to be them.”

— Dorothy Allison

stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.

— Dorothy Allison

Behind the story I tell is the one I don't...Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make…

— Dorothy Allison

“Sex then, no matter how dangerous. Sex then, no matter what the cost. Never again, I promised, would I let anyone persuade…

— Dorothy Allison

“wanted an operation, not the boy-making kind, but a lever in the flesh, one I could permanently switch to off. I longed…

— Dorothy Allison

“Once I was born, her hopes had turned and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun”

— Dorothy Allison

“Fiction is the great liar that tells the truth about how the world really lives.”

— Dorothy Allison

“People don't do right because of the fear of God or love of him. You do the right thing because the world…

— Dorothy Allison

“❝ fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies into meaning.❞”

— dorothy allison

I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be…

— Dorothy Allison

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

— Dorothy Allison

... suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of…

— Dorothy Allison

It has seemed to me that literature, as I meant it, was embattled, that it was increasingly difficult to find writing doing…

— Dorothy Allison

The only magic we have is what we make in ourselves, the muscles we build up on the inside, the sense of…

— Dorothy Allison

One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.

— Dorothy Allison

“What I have tried to do in my own life is refuse the language and categories that would reduce me to less…

— Dorothy Allison

I wanted to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. I wanted to…

— Dorothy Allison

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…

— Dorothy Allison

“My stories are not against anyone; they are for the life we need.”

— Dorothy Allison

“Let me tell you a story. I tell stories to prove I was meant to survive, knowing it is not true.”

— Dorothy Allison