Quotes from Dorothy Allison

could not have explained, but it was not actually baptism I wanted, or welcome to the congregation, or even the breathless concentration of the preacher. It was that moment of sitting on the line between salvation and damnation with the preacher and the old women pulling bodily at my poor darkened soul. I wanted that moment to go on forever

They looked young, even Nevil, who'd had his teeth knocked out, while the aunts—Ruth, Raylene, Alma, and even Mama—seemed old, worn-down, and slow, born to mother, nurse, and clean up after the men.

Every time I sit down to write, I have a great fear that anything I write will reveal me as the monster I was always told I would be, but that fear is personal, something I must face in everything I do, every act I contemplate.

I believe in the remade life, the possibilities inherent in our lesbian and gay chosen families, our families of friends and lovers, the healing that can take place among the most wounded of us. My family of friends has kept me alive through lovers who have left, enterprises that have failed, and all too many stories that never got finished. That family has been part of remaking the world for me.

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.

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

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

Look around you. Apartheid is being dismantled and Nelson Mandela walks the streets of South Africa. Until a few years ago, I could not imagine that happening. Russia is a new place, so is China. The communist bogeyman I was threatened with throughout my childhood is gone. The world is no less dangerous, and people are still dying for their origins, beliefs, color, and sexuality, but I find myself full of startled awe and hope. The rigid world into which I was born has been shaken profoundly.

When the men at the counter weren't slipping quarters in her pocket they were bringing her things, souvenirs or friendship cards, once or twice a ring. Mama smiled, joked, slapped ass, and firmly passed back anything that looked like a down payment on something she didn't want to sell.

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.

there are no valid generalizations to be made about sex and women's lives except for the central fact that we are all hungry for the power of desire and we are all terribly afraid.

I do not want to claim a safe and comfortable life for myself that is purchased at the cost of some other woman's needs or desires.

Moreover, just as I was terrified of addressing my own racism, so, too, other women were afraid of stepping into the deep and messy waters of class and sexual desire. If we get into this, what might we lose? If we expose this, what might our enemies do with it? And what might it mean? Will we have to throw out all the theory we have built with such pain and struggle? Will we have to start over? How are we going to try to make each other safe while we work it through?

Growing up was like falling into a hole.

fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies into meaning.?

Take them as letters from a battleground more mythic than remembered, and use them to figure out who you are and what you might become.

The holy act of sex, my sex, done in your name, done for the only, the best reason. Because we want it.

believe that sexual desire is a powerful emotion and a healthy one. I'm pretty sure that when anyone acknowledges and acts on their desire, it does us all some good—even if only by giving other people permission to act on their desire—that it is sexual repression that warps desire and hurts people.

Men could do anything, and everything they did, no matter how violent or mistaken, was viewed with humor and understanding. The sheriff would lock them up for shooting out each other's windows, or racing their pickups down the railroad tracks, or punching out the bartender over at the Rhythm Ranch, and my aunts would shrug and make sure the children were all right at home. What men did was just what men did. Some days I would grind my teeth, wishing I had been born a boy.

Sex then, no matter how dangerous. Sex then, no matter what the cost. Never again, I promised, would I let anyone persuade me to rob myself.

Entitlement, I have told them, is a matter of feeling like we rather than they.

wanted an operation, not the boy-making kind, but a lever in the flesh, one I could permanently switch to off. I longed for immunity, distance, relief—not the end of all sex, but the end of the need, and more than the flesh, the end of the need for love

The things you hesitate to talk about," Bertha repeated in her husky North Carolina accent, "those are the things you should be writing about.

Deux ou trois choses dont je suis sûre, et l'une d'entre elles est que raconter l'histoire jusqu'au bout est un acte d'amour