He never said "Don't tell your mama." He never had to say it. I did not know how to tell anyone what I felt, what scared me and shamed me... (109)
Dorothy AllisonBeauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.
Dorothy AllisonPeople begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back.
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 AllisonIt 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 Allison