213 Quotes by Dorothy Allison

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

I want the society in which I live to be clear about the reality of our families; to know all the ways in which we avoid the issues of violence, abuse, and societal contempt; and to see survivors as more than victims. If we know more about what it means to survive abuse, we will be better able to help those still caught in the whole shameful secret world of physical and sexual violence.

My family of friends has kept me alive through lovers who have left, enterprises that have failed, and all too many stories that never got finished. That family has been part of remaking the world for me.

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

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

It was not only that false biographies tended to overshadow true ones, they obscured a hard fact that all fiction writers know—which is simply that real life is far less believable than fiction. That is in fact part of the power of nonfiction narratives. To take details from “real life” into fiction and make them believable requires careful work: creating characters the reader can believe would do the unbelievable and setting up a scene where those events make some kind of sense.

Asking “what if” and answering that question is the bedrock of what the novel can achieve. The story becomes something more than one person's perspective—it reaches as far as the novelist can imagine.

I made my life, the same way it looks like you're gonna make yours—out of pride and stubbornness and too much anger. You better think hard, Ruth Anne, about what you want and who you're mad at. You better think hard.

Language can carry us past the horror to the sense of purpose in a life that refuses to surrender to that darkness.