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.
So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.
Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die?
Thus we never see the true state of our condition till it is illustrated to us by its contraries, nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.
Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.
Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think...of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the 'right' notes and the 'wrong' ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.
He look'd in years, yet in his years were seen A youthful vigor, and autumnal green.
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