Dorothy Allison Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe.
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I wanted to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. I wanted to run away from who we had been seen to be, who we had been... It's the first thing I think of when trouble comes - the geographic solution. Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over. What hides behind that impulse is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, is valueless, better off abandoned, that running away is easier than trying to change things, that change itself is not possible.
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I have a terrible memory.
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Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.
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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.
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Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world
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I think I would have died if there hadn't been the women's movement. It gave me a vision that I could do something different, and it gave me an understanding that I wasn't a monster, or sport, or a betrayer of my family.
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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.
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And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained. And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.
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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.
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I think I would have died if there hadn't been the women's movement.
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Don't go taking that gospel stuff seriously. It's nice to clean you out now and then, but it ain't for real. It's like bad whiskey. Run through you fast and leave you with pain.
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What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.
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When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.
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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.
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The bottom line is I'm writing to save the dead. I'm writing to save the people I have lost, some of whose bodies are still walking around.
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I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.
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I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.
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fiction is the great lie that tells the truth
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Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different..." from Two or Three Things i Know For Sure
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Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.
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Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs.
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It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.
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... 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
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I wanted her to to go on talking and understand without me saying anything. 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. (107)
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I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.
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I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.
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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.
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