“ 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… Dorothy Allison
“ Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different..." from Two or Three Things i Know For Sure 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 loo… 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… 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… 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
“ 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
“ What are you so angry about?" my mother had asked me the last time I had gone home to visit.Why aren't you more angry, I had wanted to ask her. But I couldn't talk to my mother that way. She understoo… 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
“ 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 a… 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 be… Dorothy Allison
“ Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time. 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 thin… 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
“ 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 exc… 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… 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 sh… Dorothy Allison
