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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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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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Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe.
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Delia picked at the raw sores of her conscience...Drunk or sober, Delia lived in the small town in her heart, ignoring the world in which all her love had turned to grief.
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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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Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.
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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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People don't do right because of the fear of God or love of him. You do right because the world doesn't make sense if you don't.
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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 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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It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.
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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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I claimed myself and remade my life.
Dorothy Allison
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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'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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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
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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.
Dorothy Allison
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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.
Dorothy Allison
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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.
Dorothy Allison