When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.
Dorothy AllisonThe worst thing in the world was the way I felt when I wanted us to be like the families in the books in the library, when I just wanted Daddy Glen to love me like the father in Robinson Crusoe. (209)
Dorothy AllisonDelia picked at the raw sores of her conscience...Drunk or sober, Delia lived in the small town in her heart, ignoring the world in which all her love had turned to grief.
Dorothy AllisonI 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 AllisonI 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