Quotes from Dorothy Allison

She blushed. I love it when women blush, especially those big butch girls who know you want them. And I wanted her. I did. I wanted her. But she was a difficult woman, wouldn't let me give her a backrub, read her palm, or sew up the tear in her jeans—all those ritual techniques Southern femmes have employed in the seduction of innocent butch girls.

The books still weren't real, but maybe they were written about city women, television women, Yankee women—just about as strange as Zeus had always been and Jesus was getting to be.

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. Hurston understood that. But then she and I write out of despised cultures that on some level we feel we're defending.

Stories open the door to the darkened room. Language can carry us past the horror to the sense of purpose in a life that refuses to surrender to that darkness.

You are trying to put something on the page worth what it costs you to put it on the page.

Anything." I loved the way she said that. Granny's "Christian women" came out like new spit on a dusty morning, pure and precious and deeply satisfying.

When I finally let someone into my narrow bed, the first thing I told her was what I could not do. I said, I can't fix it, girl. I can't fix anything. If you don't as me to fix it, you can ask anything else. If you can say what you need, I'll try to give it to you.

that the biggest part of the struggle as a child is about trying to believe you are not the monster you are being told you are. You need to know that you are a real person, that this thing happening to you is not something you are making happen—because when I was a child I thought I was doing it. I thought that if only I were a little better, a little smarter, a little meaner, a little faster, or maybe even a better Christian, none of those terrible things would be happening.

If we are forced to talk about our lives, our sexuality, and our work only in the language and categories of a society that despises us, eventually we will be unable to speak past our own griefs. We will disappear into those categories. What I have tried to do in my own life is refuse the language and categories that would reduce me to less than my whole complicated experience.

Romantic love continues the status quo in which we both are victimized and victimize each other.

that the biggest part of the struggle as a child is about trying to believe you are not the monster you are being told you are.

In the worst moments of my life, I have told myself that story, the story about a girl who stood up to a monster.

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. It is a belief that dominates this culture. It is what makes the poor whites of the South so determinedly racist and the middle class so contemptuous of the poor.

The boys would quit school and sooner or later go to jail for something silly. I might not quit school, not while Mama had any say in the matter, but what difference would that make? What was I going to do in five years? Work in the textile mill? Join Mama at the diner? It all looked bleak to me. No wonder people got crazy as they grew up.

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. It is, in reality, people who slide.

The rage was a good feeling, stronger and purer than the shame that followed, the fear and the sudden urge to run and hide, to deny, to pretend I did not know who I was and what the world would do to me.

If we are not to sacrifice some part of ourselves or our community, we will have to go through the grief, the fear of exposure, and struggle, with only a thin layer of trust that we will emerge whole and unbroken. I know of no other way to do this than to start by saying, I will give up nothing. I will give up no one.

I grew up poor, hated, the victim of physical, emotional, and sexual violence, and I know that suffering does not ennoble. It destroys.

The best fiction comes from the place where the terror hides, the edge of our worst stuff. I believe, absolutely, that if you do not break out in that swear of fear when you write, then you have not gone far enough.

Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones

There is a difference between fiction and nonfiction deeper than technique or intention. I value both but genuinely believe that fiction can tell a larger truth.

No lies, I thought, but lots of stories. True stories. True lies. Powerful stories, heroic tales, and cautionary fables.

even perhaps something about how love can both save us and not save us.

We wanted a feminist revolution. I wanted it like a lover. I wanted it like justice.