213 Quotes by Dorothy Allison

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

We had all wanted the simplest thing, to love and be loved and be safe together, but we had lost it and I didn’t know how to get it back.

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

I might not have ever had the courage to write those stories without that experience, that training ground in how to look at one’s own life and see it as a story.

The best fiction comes from the place where the terror hides, the edge of our worst stuff. I believe, absolutely, that if you do not break out in that swear of fear when you write, then you have not gone far enough.

Growing up was like falling into a hole.

The bottom line is I’m writing to save the dead. I’m writing to save the people I have lost, some of whose bodies are still walking around.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I’d rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.

What I loved were books that heightened the sense of life’s wonders without denying the complexity and horror that sometimes accompanied those wonders.