Shelby

“It is day after day. It is week after week. It is month after month. It is year after year. It is only time going and going. There is no joy. There is no lightness of heart. It is only the passing of days. I am young and alone.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“I want the society in which I live to be clear about the reality of our families; to know all the ways in which we avoid the issues of violence, abuse, and societal contempt; and to see survivors as more than victims. If we know more about what it means to survive abuse, we will be better able to help those still caught in the whole shameful secret world of physical and sexual violence.”
― Dorothy Allison, 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, Bastard Out of Carolina

“We had all wanted the simplest thing, to love and be loved and be safe together, but we had lost it and I didn’t know how to get it back.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina