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Dorothy Allison Biography

Dorothy Allison

Dorothy Allison (born April 11, 1949) is an American writer from South Carolina whose writing expresses 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. In 2014, Allison was elected to membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

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Dorothy Allison Quotes

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.

Fiction, Forbidden, Girl, Girls, Kids, Reader

When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.

Book, Books, Growing Up, Novels, Read, Sister

I have a terrible memory.

Memories, Memory, Terrible

Behind the story I tell is the one I don't. . . Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.

Behinds, Hear, Make, Stories, Wish

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.

Believe, Believing, Children, Crazy, Live, Lose

. . . survival is the least of my desires.

Desire, Desires, Survival

Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs.

Free, Legs, Teenager, Teenagers, Two, Walking

It has seemed to me that literature, as I meant it, was embattled, that it was increasingly difficult to find writing doing what I thought literature should do - which was simply to push people into changing their ideas about the world, and to go further, to encourage us in the work of changing the world, to making it more just and more truly human.

Ideas, Literature, Meant, People, Seemed, Writing

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.

Art, Confront, Forces, Responsibility, Story, Writing

I wanted her to to go on talking and understand without me saying anything. I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and take us away from him, to kill him if need be. (107)

Away, Goes On, Kill, Needs, Saying, Talking

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.

Belonged, Giving, Joy, Knowing, Lose

Why write stories? To join the conversation.

Conversation, Join, Stories, Write, Writing

I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. (253)

253, Fell, Rivers, Shame, Suicide

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.

Creating, Demand, Forgiven, Meaning, Meaningful, Pain

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

Class, Excavated, Needs, Race, Sexuality

Life ain't the movies.

Life, Movies

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.

And Love, Hate, Things, Three, Two, Understand

One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.

Accustomed, Backgrounds, Class, Contempt, Derive

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.

God, Make Sense, People, World

Babies change things, open doors you thought were shut, close others. Make you into something you never been.

Baby, Change, Close, Doors, Shut

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