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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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Dorothy Allison
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: April 11
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Greenville
South Carolina
Backgrounds
Class
Derive
Strengths
Accustomed
Background
Contempt

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Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.
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I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.
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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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Why write stories? To join the conversation.
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Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe.
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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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I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. (253)
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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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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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fiction is the great lie that tells the truth
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Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.
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What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.
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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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Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.
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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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I have a terrible memory.
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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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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 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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