It has seemed to me that literature, as I meant it, was embattled, that it was increasingly difficult to find writing doing what I thought literature should do - which was simply to push people into changing their ideas about the world, and to go further, to encourage us in the work of changing the world, to making it more just and more truly human.
Dorothy AllisonI have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.
Dorothy AllisonTwo 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 AllisonThere 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