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Life ain't the movies.

Dorothy Allison

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Dorothy Allison
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: April 11
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Greenville
South Carolina
Movies
Life

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.
Dorothy Allison
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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.
Dorothy Allison
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stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.
Dorothy Allison
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What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.
Dorothy Allison
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I have a terrible memory.
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
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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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Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe.
Dorothy Allison
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I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.
Dorothy Allison
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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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Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.
Dorothy Allison
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Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.
Dorothy Allison
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When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.
Dorothy Allison
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fiction is the great lie that tells the truth
Dorothy Allison
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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.
Dorothy Allison
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I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. (253)
Dorothy Allison
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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)
Dorothy Allison
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Why write stories? To join the conversation.
Dorothy Allison
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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.
Dorothy Allison
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I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.
Dorothy Allison