Quotes by Dorothy Allison

About Dorothy Allison:

Dorothy Allison is an American writer, speaker, and member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her writing includes themes of class struggle, sexual abuse, child abuse, feminism and lesbianism. She is a self-identified lesbian femme. She has won a number of awards for her writing, including several Lambda Literary Awards.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.

Dorothy Allison

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 l...

Dorothy Allison

Don't go taking that gospel stuff seriously. It's nice to clean you out now and then, but it ain't for real. It's like bad whiskey. Run through you fast and leave you with pain.

Dorothy Allison

I wanted to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. I wanted to run away from who we had been seen to be, who we had been... It's the first thing I think of when trouble comes - the geographic solution....

Dorothy Allison

Piece by piece, my mother is being stolen from me.

Dorothy Allison

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

Why write stories? To join the conversation.

Dorothy Allison

I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.

Dorothy Allison

Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read -- something most important what I should not try to write.

Dorothy Allison

I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, in the way other people's seemed real -- the lives I ...

Dorothy Allison

Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.

Dorothy Allison

Women. Lord God, I used to follow these girls. THey would come at me, those girls who were not really girls anymore. Grown up, wounded, hurt and terrible. Pained and desperate. Mean and angry. Hungry and unable to say just what they needed. Scared, a...

Dorothy Allison

Every kid I meet who's a reader has got something like that, their fantasy world. And science fiction is the best, especially for girls because it's the one place where you can do the forbidden.

Dorothy Allison

And while it is true that I got the best woman in the world, I don't think love saves you.

Dorothy Allison

I think it's wonderful that people in pickup trucks are buying two flats of dog food and a copy of 'Bastard.' I want my view of the world to be right up there next to gallon boxes of Tide.

Dorothy Allison

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

If somebody gave you several thousand dollars and nothin' to do but write, would you be a writer then? Would you tell your stories, your family's stories, then?

Dorothy Allison

Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.

Dorothy Allison

I was born in 1949, and by the time I was 10, I figured out that my hope chest was not aimed in the same direction everybody else's was. And that life was going to be very, very complicated. And that I could either be provocative and declamatory, or ...

Dorothy Allison

It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.

Dorothy Allison

Author Bio

  • NameDorothy Allison
  • Descriptionpoet, novelist, critic
  • BornApril 11, 1949
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPoet; Author; Novelist
  • AwardsLambda Literary Award