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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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Dorothy Allison
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: April 11
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Greenville
South Carolina
World
Touch
Sure
Stories
Change
Heart
Way

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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
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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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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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What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.
Dorothy Allison
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It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.
Dorothy Allison
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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.
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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I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.
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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Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.
Dorothy Allison
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I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.
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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It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.
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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fiction is the great lie that tells the truth
Dorothy Allison
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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.
Dorothy Allison