Dorothy Allison: I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into...

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.

Dorothy Allison

three beautiful two

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.

Dorothy Allison

naked three two

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.

Dorothy Allison

heart character needs

Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.

Dorothy Allison

deceit together lying

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

Dorothy Allison

race class needs

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different...I claimed myself and remade my life. Only when I knew I belonged to myself completely did I become capable of giving myself to another, of finding joy in desire, pleasure in our love, power in this body no one else owns.

Dorothy Allison

knowing joy giving

The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.

Dorothy Allison

good-life class believe

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.

Dorothy Allison

three hate two

Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you that there is magic in it, and if you show yourself naked for me, I'll be naked for you. It will be our covenant.

Dorothy Allison

naked magic writing

I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.

Dorothy Allison

crafts strong feelings

I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.

Dorothy Allison

revelations change world

I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.

Dorothy Allison

story-of-my-life stories mean

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

Dorothy Allison

writing lying fiction

What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.

Dorothy Allison

libertarian boring writing

... suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us extraordinary

Dorothy Allison

hatred self lying

Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.

Dorothy Allison

leisure quality girlfriend

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.

Dorothy Allison

opening-up pain meaningful

If I could have found what I needed at thirteen, I would not have lost so much of my life chasing vindication or death. Give some child, some thirteen-year old, the hope of the remade life. Tell the truth. Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you there is magic in it.

Dorothy Allison

writing children years

It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.

Dorothy Allison

fun people fiction

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

literature healing believe

I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. (253)