Life & Wisdom Quote by Dorothy Allison

Dorothy Allison turns a brutal social fact into a defiant stance. Growing up poor in the rural South, she learned that class in America is enforced not only through money and access, but through the daily drip of scorn. Contempt is the emotional currency of class hierarchy. To be accustomed to it is to have lived inside that economy long enough to recognize its rituals, its euphemisms, and its costs. The line claims a hard-won strength: contempt no longer surprises her, and therefore it no longer silences her.

That strength is not the same as comfort. It is a callus. Allison writes about poverty, abuse, queerness, and female desire with an unapologetic directness because she does not expect approval from the people who demand deference as the price of admission. Being trained by contempt means she can name it when she sees it, refuse to mistake condescension for care, and keep speaking even when the room goes cold. The stance protects a voice that would otherwise be bent toward pleasing gatekeepers, middle-class taste, and the soothing lie of meritocracy.

There is a sharp paradox at work. The resilience is real, and yet it arises from injury that should not have been inflicted. To call it a strength is to honor the ingenuity of survival, not the system that necessitated it. Allison exposes how contempt polices bodies and stories, especially those of working-class women and queer people, and she flips the script by making that contempt a diagnostic tool. She uses it to map power: who gets to sneer, whose pain is framed as pathology, whose truth is dismissed as vulgar. Accustomed does not mean resigned. It means prepared. It means a reader will get prose that refuses to bow, a narrator who does not beg to be respectable, and a politics that insists the terms of recognition must change.