213 Quotes by Dorothy Allison

I can’t write what I don’t believe in.

What I have tried to do in my own life is refuse the language and categories that would reduce me to less than my whole complicated experience.

Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you have ever wanted.

Books can offer a counter narrative – another story to the one we think we know.

They looked young, even Nevil, who’d had his teeth knocked out, while the aunts – Ruth, Raylene, Alma, and even Mama – seemed old, worn-down, and slow, born to mother, nurse, and clean up after the men.

I would imagine being tied up and put in a haystack while someone put the dry, stale straw ablaze. I would picture it perfectly while rocking on my hand. The daydream was about struggling to get free while the fire burned hotter and closer. I am not sure if I came when the fire reached me or after I had imagined escaping it. But I came. I orgasmed on my hand to the dream of fire.

I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, in the way other people’s seemed real – the lives I had read about in books.

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 put on the page a third look at what I’ve seen in life – the reinvented experience of a cross-eyed working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine.