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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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Dorothy Allison
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: April 11
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Greenville
South Carolina
Thing
Life
Construct
Constructs
Libertarian
Boring
Best
Writing

More quotes by 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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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.
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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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 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
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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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Life ain't the movies.
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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Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe.
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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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.
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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I have a terrible memory.
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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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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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 did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.
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