Quotes from Dorothy Allison

I reminded myself that there were just some things we never had talked about before, like sex, money, and broken bones. Certainly we had never discussed love. Sex was dangerous enough, and our family was proof that love was a disaster waiting to happen.

I say, "Talk to me. Tell me who you are, what you want, what you've never had, the story you've always been afraid to tell.

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

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different..." from Two or Three Things i Know For Sure

Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I'd rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.

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.

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.

Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe.

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.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.

Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.

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.

Behind the story I tell is the one I don't. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear. 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.

Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.

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.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.

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.

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

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.

People pay for that they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And the pay for it simply: by the lives they lead. - James Baldwin

Piece by piece, my mother is being stolen from me.

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.

Write to your fear.