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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

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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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Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs.
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One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.
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fiction is the great lie that tells the truth
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I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. (253)
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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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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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Life ain't the movies.
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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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And while it is true that I got the best woman in the world, I don't think love saves you.
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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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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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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 have a terrible memory.
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Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.
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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 did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.
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Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.
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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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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