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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.

Dorothy Allison

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Dorothy Allison
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: April 11
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Greenville
South Carolina
Different
Gave
Something
Movement
Would
Wasn
Betrayer
Think
Vision
Monster
Thinking
Sports
Hadn
Understanding
Monsters
Family
Sport
Women
Died

More quotes by Dorothy Allison

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I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.
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What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.
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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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It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.
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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'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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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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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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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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One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.
Dorothy Allison
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I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. (253)
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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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Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.
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I have a terrible memory.
Dorothy Allison
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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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Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.
Dorothy Allison
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Life ain't the movies.
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)
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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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.
Dorothy Allison