Dorothy Allison Quotes & Sayings

I have a terrible memory. — Dorothy Allison

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. — Dorothy Allison

I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, in the way other people's seemed real
the lives I had read about in books. — Dorothy Allison

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. — Dorothy Allison

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

Stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world. — Dorothy Allison

I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations. — Dorothy Allison

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
— Dorothy Allison

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. — Dorothy Allison

I put on the page a third look at what I've seen in life - the reinvented experience of a cross-eyed working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine. — Dorothy Allison

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

Once I was born, her hopes had turned and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun — Dorothy Allison

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. — Dorothy Allison

I was born in 1949, and by the time I was 10, I figured out that my hope chest was not aimed in the same direction everybody else's was. And that life was going to be very, very complicated. And that I could either be provocative and declamatory, or shy, retiring and scared. — Dorothy Allison

Write to your fear. — Dorothy Allison

Mama learned to laugh with them, before they could laugh at her, and to do it so well no one could be sure what she really thought or felt. — Dorothy Allison

I made my life, the same way it looks like you're gonna make yours - out of pride and stubbornness and too much anger. You better think hard, Ruth Anne, about what you want and who you're mad at. You better think hard. — Dorothy Allison

I claimed myself and remade my life. — Dorothy Allison

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

Never give anyone the satisfaction of denying you something you need, and for that, what you have to do is to learn to need nothing. Starve the wanting part of you.
Dorothy Allison,
"Mama"
Trash — Dorothy Allison

When my mama was twenty-five she already had an old woman's hands, and I feared them. I did not know then what it was that scared me so. I've come to understand since that it was the thought of her growing old, of her dying and leaving me alone. I feared those brown spots, those wrinkles and cracks that lined her wrists, ankles, and the soft shadowed sides of her eyes. — Dorothy Allison

Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs. — Dorothy Allison

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. — Dorothy Allison

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) — Dorothy Allison

Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read
something most important what I should not try to write. — Dorothy Allison

You got to hold still, I thought. Perfectly still. I concentrated, focused, felt my arms become rigid, stern and strong. I pulled back the trigger slowly, squeezing steadily. The bottle exploded, water shooting out in a wide fine spray. 'Goddamn!' Anne shouted. She was staring at me like I had stared at her earlier, her whole face open with pride and delight. Sexy, yeah. I pointed the barrel at the sky and let my mouth widen into a smile. 'Goddamn,' I said, and meant it with all my heart. — Dorothy Allison

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

I told her, Don't touch me that way. Don't come at me with that sour-cream smile. Come at me as if I were worth your life - the life we make together. 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. — Dorothy Allison

Delia picked at the raw sores of her conscience ... Drunk or sober, Delia lived in the small town in her heart, ignoring the world in which all her love had turned to grief. — Dorothy Allison

I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft. — Dorothy Allison

I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain. — Dorothy Allison

Babies change things, open doors you thought were shut, close others. Make you into something you never been. — Dorothy Allison

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. — Dorothy Allison

I am the dangerous daughter, thigh-stroking, soft-tongued lover, the pit, the well, and the well of horniness, laughter rolling up out of me like gravy boiling over the edge of a pan. I become the romantic, the mystic, the one without shame, rocking myself on the hip of a rock, a woman as sharp as coral. I make in my mind the muscle that endures, tame rage and hunger to spirit and blood. I become the rock. I become the knife. I am myself the mystery. The me that will be waits for me. If I cannot dream myself new, how will I find my true self? — Dorothy Allison

We all nourish truth with our tongues
not in sour-batter words that never take shape
nor line-driven stories bent to skirt the edge
of our great exhaustion, desire, and doubt.
We all use simply the words of our own lives
to say what we really want,
to lie spent on our lovers,
put teeth to all we hate,
to strain the juice of our history
between what has been allowed
and what has always been denied,
the active desire to take hold of the root. — Dorothy Allison

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. — Dorothy Allison

Hunger makes you restless. you dream about food - not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother's milk singing to your bloodstream. — Dorothy Allison

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. — Dorothy Allison

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. — Dorothy Allison

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. — Dorothy Allison

I am the woman who lost herself but now is found, the lesbian, outside the law of the church and man, the one who has to love herself or die. If you are not as strong as I am, what will be make together? I am all muscle and wounded desire, and I need to know how strong we both can be. — Dorothy Allison

fiction is the great lie that tells the truth — Dorothy Allison

I was no Cherokee. I was no warrior. I was nobody special. I was just a girl, scared and angry. When I saw myself in Daddy Glen's eyes, I wanted to die. No, I wanted to be already dead, cold and gone. Everything felt hopeless. He looked at me and I was ashamed of myself. It was like sliding down an endless hole, seeing myself at the bottom, dirty, ragged, poor, stupid. — Dorothy Allison

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. — Dorothy Allison

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. — Dorothy Allison

Change, when it comes, cracks everything open. — Dorothy Allison

To tell a great story, you really do have to step through the box that the world has put around you; you have to see it. You have to see what the world has defined you as. And you have to refute it in language that the world will understand ... Repay the debt that kept you alive, you will make an art and you will take a leap. And, oh God, I hope you get all the way over to the other side. Because some of us don't. — Dorothy Allison

If we are forced to talk about our lives, our sexuality, and our work only in the language and categories of a society that despises us, eventually we will be unable to speak past our own griefs. We will disappear into those categories. 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. — Dorothy Allison

Women.
Lord God, I used to follow these girls.
THey would come at me, those girls who were not really girls anymore. Grown up, wounded, hurt and terrible. Pained and desperate. Mean and angry. Hungry and unable to say just what they needed. Scared, aching, they came into my bed like I could fix it. And every time I would try. I would do anything a woman wanted as long as she didn't want too much of me. As long as I could hide behind her need, I could make her believe anything. I would tell her stories. I would bury in them. I have buried more women than I am willing to admit. I have told more lies than I can stand. — Dorothy Allison

Can a book make such a difference? Can it change you utterly?

I know it can.

(First essay from The Book That Changed My Life, edited by Roxanne J. Coady & Joy Johannessen) — Dorothy Allison

I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats. — Dorothy Allison

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. — Dorothy Allison

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

I am not here to make anyone happy. What I am here for is to claim my life, my mama's death, our losses and our triumphs, to name them for myself. — Dorothy Allison

Survival is the least of my desires. — Dorothy Allison

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. — Dorothy Allison

I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people. — Dorothy Allison

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 — Dorothy Allison

Fiction is the great liar that tells the truth about how the world really lives. — Dorothy Allison

I could not stand it, neither the words on the page nor what they told me about myself. My neck and teeth began to ache, and I was not at all sure I really wanted to live with that stuff inside me. But holding onto them, reading them over again, became a part of the process of survival, of deciding once more to live
and clinging to that decision. — Dorothy Allison

It has seemed to me that literature, as I meant it, was embattled, that it was increasingly difficult to find writing doing what I thought literature should do - which was simply to push people into changing their ideas about the world, and to go further, to encourage us in the work of changing the world, to making it more just and more truly human. — Dorothy Allison

If I could have found what I needed at thirteen, I would not have lost so much of my life chasing vindication or death. Give some child, some thirteen-year old, the hope of the remade life. Tell the truth. Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you there is magic in it. — Dorothy Allison

Watch out, or I'm liable to put you in a story. — Dorothy Allison

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. Hurston understood that. But then she and I write out of despised cultures that on some level we feel we're defending. — Dorothy Allison

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

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. — Dorothy Allison

Moving had no season, was all seasons, crossed time like a train with no schedule. We moved so often our mail never caught up with us, moved sometimes before we'd even gotten properly unpacked or I'd learned the names of all the teachers at my new school. Moving gave me a sense of time passing and everything sliding, as if nothing could be held on to anyway. It made me feel ghostly, unreal and unimportant, like a box that goes missing and then turns up but then you realize you never needed anything in it anyway. — Dorothy Allison

The hardest thing to teach young writers is that it's wonderful to tell your truth. And that's what you should do. But it damn well better be beautiful. — Dorothy Allison

People want biography. People want memoir. They want you to tell them that the story you're telling them is true. The thing I'm telling you is true, but it did not always happen to me. — Dorothy Allison

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

Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time. — Dorothy Allison

We wanted a feminist revolution. I wanted it like a lover. I wanted it like justice. — Dorothy Allison

Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama. — Dorothy Allison

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

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. — Dorothy Allison

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. — Dorothy Allison

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. — Dorothy Allison

It was a story to tell myself, a promise. Saying out loud, "You're never going to touch me again" - that was a piece of magic, magic in the belly, the domed kingdom of sex, the terror place inside where rage and power live. Whiskey rush without whiskey, bravado and determination, this place where for the first time I knew no confusion, only outrage and pride. In the worst moments of my life, I have told myself that story, the story about a girl who stood up to a monster. Doing that, I make a piece of magic inside myself, magic to use against the meanness of the world. — Dorothy Allison

My heart broke all over again. I wanted my life back, my mama, but I knew I would never have that. The child I had been was gone with the child she had been. We were new people, and we didn't know each other anymore. I shook my head desperately. — Dorothy Allison

For that is of course what it means to read a novel and live in it for a while. You are viscerally inside someone else's reality. You feel and understand things you have not known before, and that is both scary and exhilarating. The world becomes more clear, reality more vivid, and your own experience larger. Of course there will be questions. This probing is how we grow and enlarge our sense of the world itself. — Dorothy Allison

Why write stories? To join the conversation. — Dorothy Allison

People begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back. — Dorothy Allison

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.
— Dorothy Allison

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

No one knew she cried in the night for Lyle and her lost happiness, that under that biscuit crust exterior she was all butter grief and hunger. — Dorothy Allison

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. — Dorothy Allison

I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth. — Dorothy Allison

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. — Dorothy Allison

When I finally let someone into my narrow bed, the first thing I told her was what I could not do. I said, I can't fix it, girl. I can't fix anything. If you don't as me to fix it, you can ask anything else. If you can say what you need, I'll try to give it to you. — Dorothy Allison

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

I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination to shape a life, and create a literature, that was not a lie. — Dorothy Allison

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

Everything I know, everything I put in my fiction, will hurt someone somewhere as surely as it will comfort and enlighten someone else. What then is my responsibility? What am I to restrain? What am I to fear and alter
my own nakedness or the grief of the reader? I want my stories to be so good they are unforgettable; to make my ideas live and my own terrors real for people I will never meet. It is a completely amoral writer's lust. If we begin to agree that some ideas are too dangerous, too bad to invite inside our heads, then we stop the storyteller completely. We silence everyone who would tell us something that might be painful in our vulnerable moments. — Dorothy Allison

I would imagine being tied up and put in a haystack while someone put the dry, stale straw ablaze. I would picture it perfectly while rocking on my hand. The daydream was about struggling to get free while the fire burned hotter and closer. I am not sure if I came when the fire reached me or after I had imagined escaping it. But I came. I orgasmed on my hand to the dream of fire. — Dorothy Allison

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? — Dorothy Allison

I can't write what I don't believe in. — Dorothy Allison

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) — Dorothy Allison

When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels. — Dorothy Allison

I'm still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing. — Dorothy Allison

You are trying to put something on the page worth what it costs you to put it on the page. — Dorothy Allison