213 Quotes by Dorothy Allison

Maybe not for anyone else, but for me, the kind of person I am, writing meant an attempt to sneak up on the truth, to figure it out slowly through the characters on the page.

It is so hard to be a girl and want what you have never had. To be a child and want what you cannot imagine. To look at women and think, Nobody else, nobody else has ever wanted to do what I want to do. Hard to be innocent, believing yourself evil. Hard to think no one else in the history of the world wants to do this. Hard to find out that they do, but not with you. Or not in quite the way you want them to do it.

Books can offer a counter narrative – another story to the one we think we know. Story is told in a voice. The voice of Bastard Out of Carolina is that of a young girl who has just lost her mother and her sense of any real hope or justice. You don’t know who she is until the story ends, and I always intended for the ending to make the reader angry.

As I was finishing the copyediting of Bastard, I found myself thinking about all I had read when Kate Millett published Flying: her stated conviction that telling the truth was what feminist writers were supposed to do. That telling the truth – your side of it anyway, knowing that there were truths other than your own – was a moral act, a courageous act, an act of rebellion that would encourage other such acts.

Don’t go taking that gospel stuff seriously. It’s nice to clean you out now and then, but it ain’t for real. It’s like bad whiskey. Run through you fast and leave you with pain.

I say, “Talk to me. Tell me who you are, what you want, what you’ve never had, the story you’ve always been afraid to tell.

Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read – something most important what I should not try to write.

I had to say to her that it isn’t just men, and it isn’t just men “like that.” I had to talk to her about the women I had found after I left home, women who breathed out hatred as steadily as the worst man we had ever known. I had to say that the world is a bigger, meaner, more complicated place than anyone ever told us, and the tools for dealing with it are real, but we have to invent them for ourselves, make them up as we go along.

Every kid I meet who’s a reader has got something like that, their fantasy world. And science fiction is the best, especially for girls because it’s the one place where you can do the forbidden.