Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Dorothy Allison
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: April 11
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Greenville
South Carolina
Two
Something
Way
Things
Love
Sure
Understand
Hate
Three

More quotes by Dorothy Allison

Image
Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe.
Dorothy Allison
Image
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
Image
Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.
Dorothy Allison
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.
Dorothy Allison
Image
The worst thing in the world was the way I felt when I wanted us to be like the families in the books in the library, when I just wanted Daddy Glen to love me like the father in Robinson Crusoe. (209)
Dorothy Allison
Image
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
Image
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
Image
One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.
Dorothy Allison
Image
I have a terrible memory.
Dorothy Allison
Image
It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.
Dorothy Allison
Image
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
Image
stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.
Dorothy Allison
Image
I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. (253)
Dorothy Allison
Image
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)
Dorothy Allison
Image
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
Image
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.
Dorothy Allison
Image
It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.
Dorothy Allison
Image
Why write stories? To join the conversation.
Dorothy Allison