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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
Accustomed
Background
Contempt
Backgrounds
Class
Derive
Strengths

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.
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I claimed myself and remade my life.
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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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Life ain't the movies.
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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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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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I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. (253)
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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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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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stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.
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What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.
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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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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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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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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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Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe.
Dorothy Allison