Quotes from Dorothy Allison

suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us extraordinary

It ain't that you get religion. Religion gets you and then milks you dry. Won't let you drink a little whiskey. Won't let you make no fat-assed girls grin and giggle. Won't let you do a damn thing except work for what you'll get in the hearafter. I live in the here and now.

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.

For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength or something not human at all. Me, I told people, I take damage like a wall, a brick wall that never falls down, never feels anything, never flinches or remembers. I am one woman but I carry in my body all the stories I have ever been told, women I have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all.

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." (145)

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different...I claimed myself and remade my life. Only when I knew I belonged to myself completely did I become capable of giving myself to another, of finding joy in desire, pleasure in our love, power in this body no one else owns.

she got a reputation for an easy smile and a sharp tongue, and using one to balance the other, she seemed friendly but distant

The only magic we have is what we make in ourselves, the muscles we build up on the inside, the sense of belief we create from nothing.

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.

He loves her like a gambler loves a fast racehorse or a desperate man loves whiskey. That kind of love eats a man up.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you made.

I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.

my life has been saved over and over again by picking up a book in which someone captured the whole experience of being despised and not dying.

What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

If somebody gave you several thousand dollars and nothin' to do but write, would you be a writer then? Would you tell your stories, your family's stories, then?

It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.

I claimed myself and remade my life.

Life ain't the movies.

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.

My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child - one who sometimes asks me for stories of my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I have worked to make sure of that.

My sisters, we didn't like each other as kids. We were scared of each other, I think, but we've grown to love each other. It was fun to write about these sisters who were supposed to hate each other but really don't.

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