Dorothy Allison Quotes

Homeboy Industries is a healing center for broken children. I was a broken child, and they showed me how to put all those pieces back together. It's not about being a gangster. It's about being a man or a woman trying to recover and live better.

Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.

The stories that are too personally vulnerable to write are the ones that must be told.

My own belief is that people can come back from anything. It doesn't mean that it won't come at a huge cost.

The movie says, You can lose your job and your way and still rescue yourself. 'Larry Crowne' creates a self-excavated utopia, and I love that idea, that message.

I make dark dramas, movies about people living in desperate fear who then overcome that fear and find a heroic side to themselves.

I would say my whole first record, 'Steady On,' had a lot to do with healing.

'Somnia' is a story about loss and, I guess, what you're willing to do to have closure and try and feel whole again. It's a story of redemption in a sense. I don't want to give too much away, but it's a heartbreaking story that's incredibly terrifying.

I like stories about people who have to go into darkness for a good reason and then have to figure out how to deal with the darkness that seeps into their souls.

'J' is a novel. A story about what it is like for people after a terrible event. And it is a love story, because I feel a novel is inevitably a love story.

My faith was eventually what helped me face myself, tell the truth about everything I had done, face criticism, cope with guilt, pain, and grow from all of it.

I am beekeeper, but I am also a writer, and some years ago, I sat down at a typewriter to experiment with words, to try to tease out of the amorphous, chaotic and wordless part of myself the reason why I was staying on this hilltop in the Ozarks after my first husband, with whom I had started a beekeeping business, and I had divorced.

I think there's a lot of people going through different things where you feel like your whole world's imploded, and you feel like you lost it all, whether it's physical, emotional, whatever you're going through. If I can be that beacon of hope for people that need it the most through dancing and through our storytelling, then I've done my job.

They say there are no atheists in foxholes, and in the foxhole of my divorce, I found solace in walking to St. Patrick's Cathedral and lighting candles.

I just like the child's nightmares and therapy, once an experience has found the light of day I'm no longer under its spell, I'm free to tell it. I hope in telling honestly I can in some way help other people to do so also.

Could a body broken and blood spilled two thousand years ago restore my own damaged life?

Writing was my companion and stories were my companion when I was bedridden and didn't think I was going to walk again and all of that treacherous stuff. And stories are how you can comfort a child. It's certainly how I comforted my daughter, in good and bad times.

Wherever you are, whatever your circumstances may be, whatever misfortune you may have suffered, the music of your life has not gone. It's inside you - if you listen to it, you can play it.

Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little consequence. What was important was that the attempt to write stories kept her straight on the dividing line between truth and fiction. If she had not found this outlet in writing, she might have grown up to be a tremendous liar.

I want to try to not be the child that had to go through too much too young. I want to be who I am now and not who I was then.

I only wish that I had had the courage and the knowledge to have gotten that out of my system, out of my mind or my heart years earlier. But there is no book, there is no manual to tell you how to deal with sexual abuse.

I survived this torture which left me paralyzed for years. That's what that night was all about, mutilation, more than violence through sex. I really do feel as though I was psychologically mutilated that night and now I'm trying to put the pieces back together again. Through love, not hatred. And through my music. My strength has been to open again, to life, and my victory is the fact that, despite it all, I kept alive my vulnerability.

I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.

I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.

I learned to live many years ago. Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life in ways that, if I had my druthers, it would never have been changed at all. What I learned from it is that today seems to be the hardest lesson of all. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and to try to give some of it back because I believed in it completely and utterly.