Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature QUOTES

1 " I wanted to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. I wanted to run away from who we had been seen to be, who we had been... It's the first thing I think of when trouble comes - the geographic solution. Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over. What hides behind that impulse is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, is valueless, better off abandoned, that running away is easier than trying to change things, that change itself is not possible. "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

2 " I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination to shape a life, and create a literature, that was not a lie. "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

3 " I have lived my life in pursuit of the remade world...

I believe in truth. I believe in truth denied any use of it can believe in it. I know its power. I know the threat it represents to a world constructed on lies.

I know the myths of the family that thread through our society's literature, music, politics - and I know the reality. The reality is that for many of us family was as much the incubator of despair as the safe nurturing haven the myths promised... But I also believe in hope...

The worst thing done to us in the name of a civilized society is to label the truth of our lives material outside the legitimate subject matter of serious writers...

I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them. The only hope you have, the only hope any of us has, is the remade life. "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

4 " There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined. "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

5 " I passed whole portions of my life—days, months, years—in pure directed progress, getting up every morning and setting to work, working so hard and so continually that I avoided examining in any way what I knew about my life. Busywork became a trance state. I ignored who I really was and how I became that person, continued in that daily progress, became an automaton who was what she did. "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

6 " You got to hold still, I thought. Perfectly still. I concentrated, focused, felt my arms become rigid, stern and strong. I pulled back the trigger slowly, squeezing steadily. The bottle exploded, water shooting out in a wide fine spray. ‘Goddamn!’ Anne shouted. She was staring at me like I had stared at her earlier, her whole face open with pride and delight. Sexy, yeah. I pointed the barrel at the sky and let my mouth widen into a smile. ‘Goddamn,’ I said, and meant it with all my heart. "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

7 " 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. "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

8 " The private stories I made up for my own enjoyment tended toward the creation of slightly scary and definitely inhuman erotic machinery: androids who would do only what their programming commanded, or machines into which one could fit one’s naked and tender flesh without fear of any intrusion by the banally human. The conditioned fearfulness of a terrorized and dependent girlhood led me away from imagining any actual human sexual contact with other fearful, or possibly dangerous, humans like myself. "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

9 " If we are forced to talk about our lives, our sexuality, and our work only in the language and categories of a society that despises us, eventually we will be unable to speak past our own griefs. We will disappear into those categories. 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. "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

10 " Simple answers, reductionist politics, are the most prone to compromise, to saying we’re addressing the essential issue and all that other stuff can slide. It is, in reality, people who slide. "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

11 " The books still weren’t real, but maybe they were written about city women, television women, Yankee women—just about as strange as Zeus had always been and Jesus was getting to be. "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

12 " The things you hesitate to talk about,” Bertha repeated in her husky North Carolina accent, “those are the things you should be writing about. "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

13 " I grew up poor, hated, the victim of physical, emotional, and sexual violence, and I know that suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

14 " I learned the rule about lesbians’ nipples from the porn books my stepfather kept under his mattress, the same place I had learned about oral sex and tribadism. The last two had fascinated and excited me even though I wasn’t completely clear on how they were accomplished. Where did the hip fit, and exactly what was the tongue supposed to be searching for? It was astonishing how badly that stuff was written. How was I supposed to figure things out when it was always so short on the important details? "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

15 " I tell myself that life is the long struggle to understand and love fully. That to keep faith with those who have literally saved my life and made it possible for me to imagine more than survival, I have to try constantly to understand more, love more fully, go more naked in order to make others as safe as I myself want to be. I want to live past my own death, as my mother does, in what I have made possible for others—my sisters, my son, my lover, my community—the people I believe in absolutely, men and women whom death does not stop, who honor the truth of each other’s stories. "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

16 " Romantic love continues the status quo in which we both are victimized and victimize each other. "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

17 " Look around you. Apartheid is being dismantled and Nelson Mandela walks the streets of South Africa. Until a few years ago, I could not imagine that happening. Russia is a new place, so is China. The communist bogeyman I was threatened with throughout my childhood is gone. The world is no less dangerous, and people are still dying for their origins, beliefs, color, and sexuality, but I find myself full of startled awe and hope. The rigid world into which I was born has been shaken profoundly. "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

18 " The world is a new place, but it still needs to be remade. We still need revolutionaries. "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

19 " 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. "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature

20 " there are no valid generalizations to be made about sex and women’s lives except for the central fact that we are all hungry for the power of desire and we are all terribly afraid. "

― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature