213 Quotes by Dorothy Allison

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.

Independent presses and bookstores give access to literature specific to a place. Readers can find stories they need.

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?

The hardest thing to teach young writers is that it's wonderful to tell your truth. And that's what you should do. But it damn well better be beautiful.

Who had Mama been, what had she wanted to be or do before I was born? Once I was born, her hopes had turned, and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun.

Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.

What’s the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.

I wanted the way I felt to mean something and for everything in my life to change because of it.

For that is of course what it means to read a novel and live in it for a while. You are viscerally inside someone else’s reality. You feel and understand things you have not known before, and that is both scary and exhilarating. The world becomes more clear, reality more vivid, and your own experience larger.