Life & Wisdom Quote by Dorothy Allison

A lot of people spend their lives trying to dodge contempt; Dorothy Allison treats it like weather: unpleasant, predictable, and therefore usable. The line lands because it flips what we’re taught to call “damage” into a kind of training. If you grow up poor in a culture that romanticizes bootstraps while policing the “wrong” accents, clothes, bodies, and desires, contempt isn’t an occasional insult. It’s an atmosphere. Allison’s move is to name that atmosphere plainly, then claim it as a source of stamina rather than shame.

The intent isn’t self-pity; it’s tactical self-definition. “Strength” here doesn’t mean moral superiority, it means survival skills: the ability to keep speaking when the room has already decided you’re trash. The subtext is a critique of literary and social gatekeeping that pretends to be meritocratic. When she says she’s “accustomed” to contempt, she’s also implying that contempt is a habit of the comfortable - a reflex they barely notice, a class weapon dressed up as taste, decorum, or “standards.”

Context matters: Allison’s work (especially Bastard Out of Carolina) is steeped in working-class Southern life, violence, and the complicated loyalties of family and place. That background gives the sentence its bite. It’s not a manifesto about overcoming; it’s a report from someone who has learned to metabolize humiliation into clarity. Contempt, once familiar, loses some of its power. That’s the threat and the triumph embedded in the line.