Life & Wisdom Quote by Dorothy Allison

It’s a defiant strip-down, not a cute metaphor. Dorothy Allison is staking a claim to the one luxury her work insists on: self-definition. “Two or three things I know for sure” lands like a hard-won inventory from someone raised around instability, shame, and other people’s stories about what you are. The modest number matters; she’s not selling certainty as a lifestyle brand. She’s naming the few truths that survive poverty, abuse, and the constant pressure to perform gratitude for whatever scraps the world hands you.

The “coat the world has made for me” is a razor-sharp image of social labeling: class, gender, sexuality, Southernness, “white trash,” survivor. A coat is supposed to protect you and make you presentable; Allison flips it into something heavy and pre-tailored, a garment that doesn’t fit because it was never cut for her body. It’s the respectability bargain in fabric form: behave, conceal, assimilate, and you can pass. Her refusal is absolute. Nakedness here isn’t erotic; it’s exposure with agency, choosing vulnerability over costume.

In the context of Allison’s nonfiction and fiction, that choice reads as both aesthetic and political. Her sentences often refuse polite distance, insisting on the messy specifics that polite society calls “too much.” The line works because it turns humiliation inside out: what the world uses to mark and manage you becomes the thing you’d rather discard publicly than wear privately. It’s not just rebellion. It’s survival by refusing the uniform.