That was what gospel was meant to do - make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified.
Dorothy AllisonI need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way.
Dorothy AllisonI did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself.
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 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 Allison