Dorothy Allison died last week. Her words are going to live forever. My copy of Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure is a slim hardcover, littered with uneven underlines, but I also feel like so much of it, at this point, is written across my ribs. I’m not sure if anything more perfect has ever been written.

“I told her, don’t come at me that way. Don’t come at me with that sour-cream smile. Come at me as if I were worth your life — the life we make together. Take me like a turtle whose shell must be cracked, whose heart is ice, who needs your heat. Love me like a warrior, sweat up to your earlobes and all your hope between your teeth. Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you have ever wanted.”

― Two or Three Things I Know For Sure

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“I 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.”

― “Survival is the Least of My Desires,” from “Skin”

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“I know the use of fiction in a world of hard truth, the way fiction can be a harder piece of truth. The story of what happened, or what did not happen but should have — that story can become a curtain drawn shut, a piece of insulation, a disguise, a razor, a tool that changes every time it is used and sometimes becomes something other than what we intended. The story becomes the thing needed.”

― Two or Three Things I Know For Sure

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“What was it like to be a lesbian before the women’s movement? It was to have the most dangerous addiction, risk the greatest loss, defy the most terrible consequences. The moon was not sufficient, and too many of us hated ourselves and feared our desire. But when we found each other, we made miracles, miracles of hope and defiance and love.”

― “Femme,” from Skin

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“I 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. That was all part of deciding to live, though I didn’t know it.”

― “Deciding to Live,” from Trash

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Two or three things I know, but this is the one I am not supposed to talk about, how it comes together —sex and violence, love and hatred. I’m not ever supposed to put together the two halves of my life — the man who walked across my childhood and the life I have made for myself. I am not supposed to talk about hating that man when I grew up to be a lesbian, a dyke, stubborn, competitive, and perversely lustful.

“People might get confused,” a woman once told me. She was a therapist and a socialist, but she worried about what people thought. “People might imagine that sexual abuse makes lesbians.”

“Oh, I doubt it.” I was too angry to be careful. “If it did, there would be so many more.”

― Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure

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“Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t. Behind every story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear. Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.”

― Two or Three Things I Know For Sure

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“It was not only that false biographies tended to overshadow true ones, they obscured a hard fact that all fiction writers know—which is simply that real life is far less believable than fiction. That is in fact part of the power of nonfiction narratives. To 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.”

― Prologue to “Bastard Out of Carolina”

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“Love was a mystery. Love was a calamity. Love was a curse that had somehow skipped me, which was no doubt why I was so good at multiple-choice tests and memorizing poetry. Sex was the country I ahd been dragged into as an unwilling girl —sex, and the madness of the body. For all that it could terrify and confuse me, sex was something I had assimilated. Sex was game or a weapon or an addiction. Sex was familiar. But love —love was another country.

― Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure

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“We are under so many illusions about our powers. Illusions that vary with the moon, the mood, the moment. Waxing, we are all-powerful. We are the mother-destroyers, She-Who-Eats-Her-Young, devours her lover, her own heart, great-winged midnight creatures and the witches of legend. Waning, we are powerless. We are the outlaws of the earth, daughters of nightmare, victimized, raped and abandoned in our own bodies. We tell ourselves lies and pretend not to know the difference. It takes all we have to know the truth, to believe in ourselves without reference to moon, or magic.”

― “Muscles of the Mind” from Trash

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“Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Children go crazy. Really, even children go crazy, believing the shape of the life they must live is as small and mean and broken as they are told.”

―Two or Three Things I Know For Sure

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“If we, as writers, are to continue, we need more people of large ambition, people who refuse censorship, denial, and hatred, people who still hope to change the world. Writers who see themselves as revolutionaries, who turn up at demonstrations or envelope-stuffing parties with shadows under their eyes that prove how many nights they’ve gotten up, after a limited sleep, to hone their skills an dream on the page the remade world. I have lived my life in pursuit of the remade world.”

― “Survival is the Least of My Desires” from Skin

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“The only magic we have is what we make in ourselves, the muscles we build up on the inside, the sense of belief we create from nothing.”
― from Trash

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“Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.”

― Two or Three Things I Know For Sure

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“I tell myself that life is the long struggle to understand and love fully. That to keep faith with those who have literally saved my life and made it possible for me to imagine more than survival, I have to try constantly to understand more, love more fully, go more naked in order to make others as safe as I myself want to be. I want to live past my own death, as my mother does, in what I have made possible for others —my sisters, my son, my lover, my community — the people I believe in absolutely, men and women whom death does not stop, who honor the truth of each other’s stories.”

― “Skin, Where She Touches Me” from Skin