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.
Interpretation
This quote explores the hidden emotions and struggles behind seemingly mundane aspects of life.
Dorothy Allison's quote delves into the complexity of human experience, suggesting that beneath the surface of everyday life lie deeper struggles and emotions. The 'carefully buttoned collar' symbolizes the facade people present to the world, while the mention of 'nakedness' reveals vulnerability and the inherent struggles that often go unnoticed, such as the pursuit of basic needs and the tumultuous emotions tied to love and anger. This highlights how our external behaviors often mask internal conflicts and the silent battles we face.
In practice
In a speech about mental health awareness, one might use this quote to illustrate the hidden struggles people face.
Hunger makes you restless. you dream about food - not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother's milk singing to your bloodstream.
I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.
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.
There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto-God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.
And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained. And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.
Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.
The soul is not the body and it may be in one body or in another, and pass from body to body.
The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.
Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.
It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this "once in a thousand years" has come today.
Hold loosely to the things of this life, so that if God requires them of you, it will be easy to let them go.
For ages this idea has been proclaimed in the consummately wise teachings of religion, probably not alone as a means of insuring peace and harmony among men, but as a deeply founded truth. The Buddhist expresses it in one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one.
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