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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
Tells
Fiction
Lying
Truth
Great

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Why write stories? To join the conversation.
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stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.
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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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I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.
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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.
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It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.
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He never said Don't tell your mama. He never had to say it. I did not know how to tell anyone what I felt, what scared me and shamed me... (109)
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Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.
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I have a terrible memory.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.
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People begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back.
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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.
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Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs.
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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.
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