“Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“Everything that comes to us is a blessing or a test. That’s all you need to know in this life…just the certainty that God’s got His eye on you, that He knows what you are made of, what you need to grow on. Why,questioning’s a sin, it’s pointless. He will show you your path in His own good time. And long as I remember that, I’m fine.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“People pay for that they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And the pay for it simply: by the lives they lead. - James Baldwin”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“People don't do right because of the fear of God or love of him. You do the right thing because the world doesn't make sense if you don't." (145)”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“He loves her like a gambler loves a fast racehorse or a desperate man loves whiskey. That kind of love eats a man up.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“My heart broke all over again. I wanted my life back, my mama, but I knew I would never have that. The child I had been was gone with the child she had been. We were new people, and we didn't know each other anymore. I shook my head desperately.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“Mama learned to laugh with them, before they could laugh at her, and to do it so well no one could be sure what she really thought or felt.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“That was what gospel was meant to do - make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. (253)”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“I wanted her to to go on talking and understand without me saying anything. I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and take us away from him, to kill him if need be. (107)”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“The 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 Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“I would imagine being tied up and put in a haystack while someone put the dry, stale straw ablaze. I would picture it perfectly while rocking on my hand. The daydream was about struggling to get free while the fire burned hotter and closer. I am not sure if I came when the fire reached me or after I had imagined escaping it. But I came. I orgasmed on my hand to the dream of fire.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“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 Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“I was no Cherokee. I was no warrior. I was nobody special. I was just a girl, scared and angry. When I saw myself in Daddy Glen's eyes, I wanted to die. No, I wanted to be already dead, cold and gone. Everything felt hopeless. He looked at me and I was ashamed of myself. It was like sliding down an endless hole, seeing myself at the bottom, dirty, ragged, poor, stupid.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“Moving had no season, was all seasons, crossed time like a train with no schedule. We moved so often our mail never caught up with us, moved sometimes before we'd even gotten properly unpacked or I'd learned the names of all the teachers at my new school. Moving gave me a sense of time passing and everything sliding, as if nothing could be held on to anyway. It made me feel ghostly, unreal and unimportant, like a box that goes missing and then turns up but then you realize you never needed anything in it anyway.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“No one knew she cried in the night for Lyle and her lost happiness, that under that biscuit crust exterior she was all butter grief and hunger.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“Once I was born, her hopes had turned and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“For that is of course what it means to read a novel and live in it for a while. You are viscerally inside someone else’s reality. You feel and understand things you have not known before, and that is both scary and exhilarating. The world becomes more clear, reality more vivid, and your own experience larger.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“I made my life, the same way it looks like you're gonna make yours—out of pride and stubbornness and too much anger. You better think hard, Ruth Anne, about what you want and who you're mad at. You better think hard.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“Anney makes the best gravy in the county, the sweetest biscuits, and puts just enough vinegar in those greens. Glenn nodded, though the truth was he’d never had much of a taste for greens, and his well-educated mama had always told him that gravy was bad for the heart. So he was not ready for the moment when Mama pushed her short blond hair back and set that big plate of hot food down in front of his open hands. Glenn took a bite of gristly meat and gravy, and it melted between his teeth. The greens were salt sweet and fat rich. His tongue sang to his throat; his neck went loose, and his hair fell across his face. It was like sex, that food, too good to waste on the middle of the day and a roomful of men too tired to taste. He chewed, swallowed began to come alive himself. He began to feel for the first time like one of the boys, a grown man accepted by the notorious and dangerous Earle Boatwright, staring across the counter at one of the prettiest woman he’d ever seen. His face went hot, and he took a big drink of ice tea to cool himself.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“he had never imagined she would leave him for messing around with girls he would never have married and didn’t love.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“They looked young, even Nevil, who’d had his teeth knocked out, while the aunts—Ruth, Raylene, Alma, and even Mama—seemed old, worn-down, and slow, born to mother, nurse, and clean up after the men.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“Half asleep in the sun, reassured by the familiar smell of frying fat, I’d make promises to God. If only He’d let me be a singer! I knew I’d probably turn to whiskey and rock ’n’ roll like they all did, but not for years, I promised. Not for years, Lord. Not till I had glorified His name and bought Mama a yellow Cadillac and a house on Old Henderson Road.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“I might not have ever had the courage to write those stories without that experience, that training ground in how to look at one’s own life and see it as a story.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“What I loved were books that heightened the sense of life’s wonders without denying the complexity and horror that sometimes accompanied those wonders.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“my tribe: raped children, working-class girls, and those raised to both love and hate their own as I had been.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and take us away from him, to kill him if need be.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
“take details from “real life” into fiction and make them believable requires careful work: creating characters the reader can believe would do the unbelievable and setting up a scene where those events make some kind of sense.”
― Dorothy Allison, quote from Bastard Out of Carolina
Dorothy Allison
Born place: in The United States
Born date April 11, 1949
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“Do something that scares you everyday.”
― Melina Marchetta, quote from Saving Francesca
“There is something profoundly cynical, my friends, in the notion of paradise after death. The lure is evasion. The promise is excusative. One need not accept responsibility for the world as it is, and by extension, one need do nothing about it. To strive for change, for true goodness in this mortal world, one must acknowledge and accept, within one’s own soul, that this mortal reality has purpose in itself, that its greatest value is not for us, but for our children and their children. To view life as but a quick passage along a foul, tortured path – made foul and tortured by our own indifference – is to excuse all manner of misery and depravity, and to exact cruel punishment upon the innocent lives to come. I defy this notion of paradise beyond the gates of bone. If the soul truly survives the passage, then it behooves us – each of us, my friends – to nurture a faith in similitude: what awaits us is a reflection of what we leave behind, and in the squandering of our mortal existence, we surrender the opportunity to learn the ways of goodness, the practice of sympathy, empathy, compassion and healing – all passed by in our rush to arrive at a place of glory and beauty, a place we did not earn, and most certainly do not deserve.”
― Steven Erikson, quote from The Bonehunters
“Quiet people keep thier secrets to themselves. That's what makes them interesting...and usually worth the wait.”
― Kirsten Miller, quote from Inside the Shadow City
“You can't let the past ruin your future, I changed over in my mind.”
― Maria V. Snyder, quote from Storm Glass
“Some people were born just so they could be buried.”
― Donald Ray Pollock, quote from The Devil All the Time
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