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.
Dorothy Allison
Dorothy Allison (b. 1949), U.S. author and lesbian feminist. Skin, ch. 18 (1994).
Allison had suffered a poverty-stricken, violence-ridden, Southern childhood.