Dorothy Allison Quotes

In 1985, I was living with my sister in Virginia, and since I was still in high school, I worked at McDonald's to save money to get an abortion. It sounds really terrible, but it was the best decision I ever made. It was the first time I took responsibility for my actions. I messed up, had sex without contraception, and got pregnant at 15.

Life is full of what-ifs, many of which could easily have been realities, had just a few things been different.

I had arrived years ago in Paris and just wanted to be famous, fast. When you're pretentious like that, and you think you've planned everything perfectly, it's then that everything goes in the opposite way.

A lot of the girls I grew up with were pregnant by the time they were 16. I just was lucky.

The way to screw up somebody's life is to give them what they want.

History is the unfolding of miscalculations

Ignorance of the facts of life gave me my beloved son, Dickon, but at what cost to both him and me, I cannot hazard a guess.

I buy things with the best of intention of living in them and then life intercedes.

There are things you're supposed to learn in life. My biggest regret was terminating a pregnancy when I was about 18. Every day, I think about who that baby would be now; it still makes me sad.

Man never legislates, but destinies and accidents, happening in all sorts of ways, legislate in all sorts of ways.

Some things don't wind up sounding like you'd expect, which is just as well.

Often my characters don't know what the issues of the play are. They think they're doing one thing, but something else is actually orchestrating their lives.

What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.

Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.

No amount of thought can ever reveal what comes unexpectedly.

The trap is that you then just start doing stuff about Hollywood, which I don't really want to do.

I'm so fascinated by the concept of teen pregnancy for some reason. Not that I condone it or promote it, but it's just a very real thing in our country and culture.

I wouldn't change a single thing, because one change alters every moment that follows it.

It is an endless procession of surprises. The expected rarely occurs and never in the expected manner.

Usually, when a young girl is pregnant, she drops out of school and concentrates on being a mother. I thought that's what I had to do, but my counselors told me there was no way they would let me drop out. I had too much promise.

We can no longer waste time and money. Every day, more than 2,000 girls in America, age 15-19, give birth - in the wealthiest, most educated nation in the world! Neither you nor I should accept this statistic.

I think if we were going to worry about teen pregnancy being glamorized, we should worry about shows like 'Teen Mom'. If people are going to want to have children at a young age because they see it on TV, I think that depends on the type of person you're dealing with.

I was 30 before I realized, you know, that I probably was an accident. These things just suddenly hit you one day.

My route so far through life hasn't been particularly logical, or even thought out.

My life is studded with a series of coincidences.