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fiction is the great lie that tells the truth

Dorothy Allison

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Dorothy Allison
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: April 11
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Greenville
South Carolina
Great
Tells
Fiction
Lying
Truth

More quotes by Dorothy Allison

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I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.
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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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I claimed myself and remade my life.
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stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.
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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.
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Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.
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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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What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.
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I have a terrible memory.
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Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Children go crazy. Really, even children go crazy, believing the shape of the life they must live is as small and mean and broken as they are told.
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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
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Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.
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That was what gospel was meant to do - make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified.
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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.
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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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I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. (253)
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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.
Dorothy Allison
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It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.
Dorothy Allison
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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
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When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.
Dorothy Allison