Dorothy Allison Quotes

Don't go taking that gospel stuff seriously. It's nice to clean you out now and then, but it ain't f...

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

Can a book make such a difference? Can it change you utterly?I know it can.(First essay from The Boo...

Everything I know, everything I put in my fiction, will hurt someone somewhere as surely as it will ...

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different..." from Two or Three Things i Kn...

Why write stories? To join the conversation.

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

Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yok...

Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.

I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to s...

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

Women.Lord God, I used to follow these girls. THey would come at me, those girls who were not really...

Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about ...

Write to your fear.

My family of friends has kept me alive through lovers who have left, enterprises that have failed, a...

If you just go get one of these little fine arts degrees or writing program degrees, it never forces...

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to m...

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

What are you so angry about?" my mother had asked me the last time I had gone home to visit.Why aren...

I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination ...

I wanted to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. ...

I made my life, the same way it looks like you're gonna make yours—out of pride and stubbornness and...

It ain't that you get religion. Religion gets you and then milks you dry. Won't let you drink a litt...