Home > Work > Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature
41 " believe that sexual desire is a powerful emotion and a healthy one. I’m pretty sure that when anyone acknowledges and acts on their desire, it does us all some good—even if only by giving other people permission to act on their desire—that it is sexual repression that warps desire and hurts people. "
― Dorothy Allison , Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature
42 " Sex was dangerous, a trap, trashy as drinking whiskey in a paper cup or telling dirty stories in a loud whisper. Sex was a sure sign of having nothing better to hope for. "
43 " By the time that poem became the story “River of Names,”* I had made the decision to reverse that process: to claim my family, my true history, and to tell the truth not only about who I was but about the temptation to lie. "
44 " My stories are not against anyone; they are for the life we need. "
45 " Shulamith Firestone "
46 " 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. "
47 " I became convinced that to survive I would have to remake the world so that it came closer to matching its own ideals. "
48 " Both of us had grown up believing that being beaten is normal, that being backhanded is ordinary, that being called names is a regular part of life. That everyone does it, that they just don’t talk about it in public. "
49 " The reality is that for many of us family was as much the incubator of despair as the safe nurturing "