Dorothy Allison Quotes - Page 3

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.

Babies change things, open doors you thought were shut, close others. Make you into something you never been.

Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs.

... survival is the least of my desires.

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.

When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.

I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats.

It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.

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)

I'm still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing.

...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.

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.

Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.

That was what gospel was meant to do - make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified.

People begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back.

I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people.

I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way.

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.

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.

fiction is the great lie that tells the truth

Life ain't the movies.

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 you don't.

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.

I claimed myself and remade my life.

I think I would have died if there hadn't been the women's movement.