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Dorothy Allison

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Dorothy Allison
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: April 11
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Greenville
South Carolina
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More quotes by Dorothy Allison

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What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.
Dorothy Allison
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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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One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.
Dorothy Allison
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It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.
Dorothy Allison
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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.
Dorothy Allison
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Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs.
Dorothy Allison
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Life ain't the movies.
Dorothy Allison
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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.
Dorothy Allison
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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.
Dorothy Allison
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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.
Dorothy Allison
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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.
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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I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.
Dorothy Allison
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I claimed myself and remade my life.
Dorothy Allison
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I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.
Dorothy Allison
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I have a terrible memory.
Dorothy Allison
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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.
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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fiction is the great lie that tells the truth
Dorothy Allison
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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.
Dorothy Allison