Quotes from Dorothy Allison

Who had Mama been, what had she wanted to be or do before I was born? Once I was born, her hopes had turned, and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun.

I had to say to her that it isn't just men, and it isn't just men "like that.

I believed in the worth of biography and even of ethnography, but I believed more powerfully in the reach of a well-told narrative that set out to pull the reader into the life of that child I had not been. I did not want to relate what had happened to me.

Asking "what if" and answering that question is the bedrock of what the novel can achieve. The story becomes something more than one person's perspective—it reaches as far as the novelist can imagine.

People don't do right because of the fear of God or love of him. You do the right thing because the world doesn't make sense if you don't.

I might not have ever had the courage to write those stories without that experience, that training ground in how to look at one's own life and see it as a story.

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.

That was what gospel was meant to do—make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified. It worked on me. It absolutely worked on me.

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

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

he had never imagined she would leave him for messing around with girls he would never have married and didn't love.

I wanted the way I felt to mean something and for everything in my life to change because of it.

I liked Revelations, loved the Whore of Babylon and the promised rivers of blood and fire. It struck me like gospel music, it promised vindication.

As I was finishing the copyediting of Bastard, I found myself thinking about all I had read when Kate Millett published Flying: her stated conviction that telling the truth was what feminist writers were supposed to do. That telling the truth—your side of it anyway, knowing that there were truths other than your own—was a moral act, a courageous act, an act of rebellion that would encourage other such acts.

Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you have ever wanted.

Shulamith Firestone

Maybe not for anyone else, but for me, the kind of person I am, writing meant an attempt to sneak up on the truth, to figure it out slowly through the characters on the page.

The world is a new place, but it still needs to be remade. We still need revolutionaries.

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

Half asleep in the sun, reassured by the familiar smell of frying fat, I'd make promises to God. If only He'd let me be a singer! I knew I'd probably turn to whiskey and rock 'n' roll like they all did, but not for years, I promised. Not for years, Lord. Not till I had glorified His name and bought Mama a yellow Cadillac and a house on Old Henderson Road.

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

Yes, somewhere inside me there is a child always eleven years old, a girlchild who holds the world responsible for all the things that terrify and call to me. But inside me too is the teenager who armed herself and fought back, the dyke who did what she had to, the woman who learned to love without giving in to fear.

I shook my head once and caught her glance, the wise and sullen look of a not quite adolescent girl who knew too much.

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. That was all part of deciding to live, though I didn't know it.