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.
A diner having a row with a waiter in a swanky restaurant chills the blood in a way that a quarrel over a pizza order elsewhere would never do. Compassion is rarely the custom of the privileged.
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
The chief purpose of life, for any of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks.
We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.
People can be slave-ships in shoes.
The result of the voyage does not depend on the speed of the ship, but on whether or not it keeps a true course.
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