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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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Dorothy Allison
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: April 11
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Greenville
South Carolina
Food
Clean
Buttoned
Moment
Sex
Allison
Moments
Meaning
Nakedness
Money
Clothes
Collar
Find
Behinds
Collars
Years
Behind
Carefully
Love
Silence
Rage
Struggle
Anger

More quotes by Dorothy Allison

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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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Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.
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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 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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It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.
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Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.
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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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I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.
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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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Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.
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Life ain't the movies.
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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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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)
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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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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 begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back.
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Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe.
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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fiction is the great lie that tells the truth
Dorothy Allison