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141 " 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. "
― Dorothy Allison , Bastard Out of Carolina
142 " 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. "
― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature
143 " Language can carry us past the horror to the sense of purpose in a life that refuses to surrender to that darkness. "
144 " Shame comes with denial. Fear fattens on lies. "
145 " 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. "
146 " What I loved were books that heightened the sense of life’s wonders without denying the complexity and horror that sometimes accompanied those wonders. "
147 " even perhaps something about how love can both save us and not save us. "
148 " . . . stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world. "
― Dorothy Allison
149 " he had never imagined she would leave him for messing around with girls he would never have married and didn’t love. "
150 " 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. "
151 " I wanted the way I felt to mean something and for everything in my life to change because of it. "
152 " Whatever magic Jesus’ grace promised, I didn’t feel it. "
153 " that the biggest part of the struggle as a child is about trying to believe you are not the monster you are being told you are. 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. "
154 " I liked Revelations, loved the Whore of Babylon and the promised rivers of blood and fire. It struck me like gospel music, it promised vindication. "
155 " 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. "
156 " Every time I sit down to write, I have a great fear that anything I write will reveal me as the monster I was always told I would be, but that fear is personal, something I must face in everything I do, every act I contemplate. "
157 " Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you have ever wanted. "
― Dorothy Allison , Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
158 " I believe in the remade life, the possibilities inherent in our lesbian and gay chosen families, our families of friends and lovers, the healing that can take place among the most wounded of us. 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. "
159 " When the men at the counter weren’t slipping quarters in her pocket they were bringing her things, souvenirs or friendship cards, once or twice a ring. Mama smiled, joked, slapped ass, and firmly passed back anything that looked like a down payment on something she didn’t want to sell. "
160 " 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 "