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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the struggle of taking action towards change despite feeling lost or unsure about the reasons behind those actions.
In this quote, Dorothy Allison expresses the inherent challenges of striving for personal and societal change. She speaks to the feeling of being propelled to act, even when the motivations or outcomes are unclear, highlighting the human desire to improve the world despite the uncertainty of one's own vision or methods. This underscores a common experience where the urgency to create change overshadows the need for complete understanding or clarity.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about embracing change in personal development.
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.
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.
I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.
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.
When enough Americans realize how rotten are the fruits of our policy of 'benign neglect,' how costly our prejudice is both in dollars and in human misery, the demand for change will be made-not for the sake of minority people, but for the sake of all of us.
When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.
In this Revolution, no plans have been written for retreat. Those who will not get into step will find that the parade has passed them by.
Look, you see those groups talkin' about negativity and anger, and they'd do that for two albums, and then you'd see them change up. I knew they couldn't do a Kurt Cobain on their whole career. You can't stay like that all the time. It's like when Hammer tried to go gangster. You can't be something that you're not.
The Autumn is old; The sere leaves are flying; He hath gather'd up gold, And now he is dying;- Old age, begin sighing!
The future isn't so much about absorbing or tolerating change, it's about making change.
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