213 Quotes by Dorothy Allison

Shulamith Firestone.

Anything.” I loved the way she said that. Granny’s “Christian women” came out like new spit on a dusty morning, pure and precious and deeply satisfying.

Essential political decisions are made not once, but again and again in a variety of situations, always against that pressure to compromise, to bargain.

You are trying to put something on the page worth what it costs you to put it on the page.

I think I would have died if there hadn’t been the women’s movement. It gave me a vision that I could do something different, and it gave me an understanding that I wasn’t a monster, or sport, or a betrayer of my family.

We wanted a feminist revolution. I wanted it like a lover. I wanted it like justice.

The boys would quit school and sooner or later go to jail for something silly. I might not quit school, not while Mama had any say in the matter, but what difference would that make? What was I going to do in five years? Work in the textile mill? Join Mama at the diner? It all looked bleak to me. No wonder people got crazy as they grew up.

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.

You need to know that you are a real person, that this thing happening to you is not something you are making happen – because when I was a child I thought I was doing it. I thought that if only I were a little better, a little smarter, a little meaner, a little faster, or maybe even a better Christian, none of those terrible things would be happening.