Dorothy Allison

Dorothy Allison
Dorothy Allisonis an American writer from South Carolina whose writing expresses themes of class struggle, sexual abuse, child abuse, feminism and lesbianism. She is a self-identified lesbian femme. She has won a number of awards for her writing, including several Lambda Literary Awards. She was elected in xxxx as a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth11 April 1949
CountryUnited States of America
damn hardest truth wonderful writers
The hardest thing to teach young writers is that it's wonderful to tell your truth. And that's what you should do. But it damn well better be beautiful.
dollars family gave several somebody thousand
If somebody gave you several thousand dollars and nothin' to do but write, would you be a writer then? Would you tell your stories, your family's stories, then?
access bookstores literature readers specific stories
Independent presses and bookstores give access to literature specific to a place. Readers can find stories they need.
beautiful two three-things
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.
two world coats
Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I'd rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.
character heart way
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.
hate two three
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.
children crazy believe
Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Children go crazy. Really, even children go crazy, believing the shape of the life they must live is as small and mean and broken as they are told.
mean stories story-of-my-life
I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.
change world revelations
I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.
drama years proud
Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.
appreciation children mean
And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained. And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.
wall pain fall
For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength or something not human at all. Me, I told people, I take damage like a wall, a brick wall that never falls down, never feels anything, never flinches or remembers. I am one woman but I carry in my body all the stories I have ever been told, women I have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all.
nice writing people
I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people.