Quotes by Dorothy Allison - Page 2

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 well better be beautiful.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Damn
Hardest Thing
Young Writers
The Hardest Thing
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If somebody gave you several thousand dollars and nothin' to do but write, would you be a writer then? Would you tell your stories, your family's stories, then?
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Dollars
Thousand
Nothin
Several
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I don't believe that there is any true friendship without a bond of honor, and the honor in friendship is the respect you give the other that she also gives you.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Believe
Giving
True Friend
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Delia picked at the raw sores of her conscience...Drunk or sober, Delia lived in the small town in her heart, ignoring the world in which all her love had turned to grief.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Drunk
Grief
Heart
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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.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Running
Nice
Pain
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Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you that there is magic in it, and if you show yourself naked for me, I'll be naked for you. It will be our covenant.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Magic
Naked
Writing
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...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Truth
Church
Lying
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I think it's wonderful that people in pickup trucks are buying two flats of dog food and a copy of 'Bastard.' I want my view of the world to be right up there next to gallon boxes of Tide.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Boxes
Buying
Dog Food
Flats
Copy
Gallon
Pickup
Tide
Trucks
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I wanted her to to go on talking and understand without me saying anything. I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and take us away from him, to kill him if need be. (107)
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Goes On
Needs
Talking
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Every kid I meet who's a reader has got something like that, their fantasy world. And science fiction is the best, especially for girls because it's the one place where you can do the forbidden.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Girl
Kids
Fantasy
Forbidden
Reader
Science Fiction
World
Best Science World
Fantasy World
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The worst thing in the world was the way I felt when I wanted us to be like the families in the books in the library, when I just wanted Daddy Glen to love me like the father in Robinson Crusoe. (209)
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Book
Daddy
Father
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Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Love Is
Sex
Struggle
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Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Heart
Three
Two
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My sisters, we didn't like each other as kids. We were scared of each other, I think, but we've grown to love each other. It was fun to write about these sisters who were supposed to hate each other but really don't.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Sisters
Grown
To Love
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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.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Character
Love You
Responsibility
Absolute
Love Responsibility People
Sinned
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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, and it gave me an understanding that I wasn't a monster, or sport, or a betrayer of my family.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Sports
Died
Thinking
Understanding
Monster
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I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Imagine
Trying
World
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Gravy is the simplest, tastiest, most memory-laden dish I know how to make: a little flour, salt and pepper, crispy bits of whatever meat anchored the meal, a couple of cups of water or milk and slow stirring to break up lumps.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Bits
Break
Couple
Cups
Flour
Gravy
Memories
Milk
Salt
Simplest
Stirring
Water
Little
Anchored
Dish
Whatever
Meal
Pepper
Slow
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Where story comes from, I don't know. I know that I become obsessed with something. An idea, an image, a person, the way a person talks. And then something starts happening that I can't explain, and it has a lot to do with language.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Way Person Know
Explain
Talks
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My heart broke all over again. I wanted my life back, my mama, but I knew I would never have that. The child I had been was gone with the child she had been. We were new people, and we didn't know each other anymore. I shook my head desperately.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Children
Heart
People
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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 look the interaction between the storyteller and story.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Art
Responsibility
Writing
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I put on the page a third look at what I've seen in life - the reinvented experience of a cross-eyed working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Class
Decision
Determination
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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 except work for what you'll get in the hearafter. I live in the here and now.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Girl
Dry
Littles
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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.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Believe
Class
Good Life
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I was born in 1949, and by the time I was 10, I figured out that my hope chest was not aimed in the same direction everybody else's was. And that life was going to be very, very complicated. And that I could either be provocative and declamatory, or shy, retiring and scared.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Complicated
Provocative
Retiring
Scared
Shy
Life Time Hope
By The Time
Chest
Direction
Figured
Life Hope Time
Same Direction
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When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels. My sister became unmarried and pregnant during high school, and she kept saying, 'This wasn't supposed to happen! Why is this happening to me?' Someone should have given her another book to read.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Sister
Pregnant
Romance
Unmarried
Me School Always
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My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child - one who sometimes asks me for stories of my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I have worked to make sure of that.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Born
Novel
Poor
Son
Stories
Ask
Child
Sure
Afraid
Author
Grow Up
Grown
Wolf
Worked
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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.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Girl
Mean
Writing
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My assumption when I began writing was that you were never going to make any money. And you were never going to reach everyone. Therefore you had to do as much as you could in the service of something you genuinely believed in. And if you do that and people get upset, well, there you go.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Assumption
Upset
Money Service People
Believed
Genuinely
Therefore
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Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different...I claimed myself and remade my life. Only when I knew I belonged to myself completely did I become capable of giving myself to another, of finding joy in desire, pleasure in our love, power in this body no one else owns.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Giving
Joy
Knowing
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Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Children go crazy. Really, even children go crazy, believing the shape of the life they must live is as small and mean and broken as they are told.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Believe
Children
Crazy
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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.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Children
Writing
Years
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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.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Character
Heart
Needs
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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.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Blessing
Eye
Long
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Hunger makes you restless. you dream about food - not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother's milk singing to your bloodstream.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Dream
Food
Mother
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It has seemed to me that literature, as I meant it, was embattled, that it was increasingly difficult to find writing doing what I thought literature should do - which was simply to push people into changing their ideas about the world, and to go further, to encourage us in the work of changing the world, to making it more just and more truly human.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Ideas
People
Writing
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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
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Hatred
Lying
Self
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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.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Girl
Dirty
Stupid
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There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto-God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Believe
Healing
Literature
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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 up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Meaningful
Opening Up
Pain
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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.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Heart
Turtles
Warrior
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For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength or something not human at all. Me, I told people, I take damage like a wall, a brick wall that never falls down, never feels anything, never flinches or remembers. I am one woman but I carry in my body all the stories I have ever been told, women I have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Fall
Pain
Wall
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And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained. And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Appreciation
Smile
Children
College
Mean
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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 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.
Dorothy Allison / Writer
Running
Past
Thinking
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Dorothy Allison Quotes - Page 2

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