Alison Bechdel Quotes & Sayings

On our second date, she kissed me in a bar. I invited her home. We just caught the F train, which seemed like a good omen. — Alison Bechdel

I have never read Sylvia Plath. My mother has never read Virginia Woolf. In general, we have stayed out of one another's way like this. — Alison Bechdel

Psychoanalytic insight, Miller seems to suggest, is itself a pathological symptom. — Alison Bechdel

Don't you kids get any ideas about dragging a trailer into the backyard. after you graduate from high school, i don't want to see you again. — Alison Bechdel

I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death. — Alison Bechdel

I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture. — Alison Bechdel

It was a vicious cycle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew. — Alison Bechdel

It could be argued that death is inherently absurd, and that grinning is not necessarily an inappropriate response. I mean absurd in the sense of ridiculous, unreasonable. One second a person is there, the next they're not. — Alison Bechdel

I hope that I can get people to read it without having to change it. Especially now that the strip has more different kinds of characters. It's really not all lesbians any more. — Alison Bechdel

Whatever we say, we're always talking about ourselves. — Alison Bechdel

I get a lot of mail from men who really identify with Stuart, you know, Sparrow's boyfriend. I love that. Even though I used to say I wanted men to read the strip even though there weren't any men in it, so they'd be forced to identify with the women. — Alison Bechdel

You can't live and write at the same time. — Alison Bechdel

How Horrid has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror
puberty, public disgrace
then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing. — Alison Bechdel

Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence streaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials... smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone. — Alison Bechdel

I'm pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history. — Alison Bechdel

I never really read superhero stuff as a kid. — Alison Bechdel

Yeah, I read Judy Blume. My mother didn't like that, but I read it anyhow. — Alison Bechdel

I just have this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and I work really hard at promoting myself. — Alison Bechdel

It's a hard thing to age a character because you can't really suddenly give someone gray hair. — Alison Bechdel

Well, I'm always working on my comic strip and trying to, you know, keep cranking that out. — Alison Bechdel

Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice. — Alison Bechdel

I'm glad mainstream culture is starting to catch up to where lesbian-feminism was 30 years ago. — Alison Bechdel

Gatsby's self-willed metamorphosis from farm boy to prince is many ways identical to my father's. Like Gatsby, my father fueled this transformation with the "colossal vitality of his illusion". Unlike Gatsby he did this on a school teacher's salary. — Alison Bechdel

I am not ultimately interested in writing fiction. I can't make things up. Or rather, I can only make things up about things that have already happened. — Alison Bechdel

At the danger of waxing nostalgic about the 'old days,' I don't want to be like everyone else. I want acceptance, but I want acceptance of my difference, not my sameness. It's a funny contract. The cultural machine wants to chew everyone up and turn them into this uniform little substance. — Alison Bechdel

Again, the troubling gap between word and meaning. My feeble language skills could not bear the weight of such a laden experience. — Alison Bechdel

Four years after my father's death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation i would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me. — Alison Bechdel

Nancy Drew was always changing her outfits. I despised girls' clothing, I couldn't wait to get home from school and get out of it. The last thing I wanted to read was minute descriptions of Nancy's frocks. — Alison Bechdel

Even drawing gray hair at all is difficult to render in black and white. — Alison Bechdel

When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults. — Alison Bechdel

Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies? — Alison Bechdel

It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive! — Alison Bechdel

I just met someone who read Gone With the Wind 62 times for exactly that same reason. She couldn't bear that it wasn't real. She wanted to live in it. — Alison Bechdel

In a narcissistic cathexis, you invest more energy into your ideas about another person than in the actual, objective, external person.
So the man who falls in love with beauty is quite different from the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her. — Alison Bechdel

One of them is already having some menopausal symptoms. I'm working on that. I'm giving them all little lines under the eyes, trying to sort of make them age gracefully. — Alison Bechdel

Whatever was going on between my parents, I suppose that my fantasy of self-sufficiency, my heavy investment in my own mind, is also a kind of narcissistic cathexis. — Alison Bechdel

My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up. — Alison Bechdel

Mom, how come you never go outside?"
"I told you, I'm a vampire. — Alison Bechdel

But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu. — Alison Bechdel

If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust. — Alison Bechdel

I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy — Alison Bechdel

The web is my unconscious but it's also a wish
a fantasy of what my own creativity might look like if I weren't constantly impeding its flow. — Alison Bechdel

Partly I resented being perceived as weak because I was a girl. — Alison Bechdel

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author. — Alison Bechdel

It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex. — Alison Bechdel

It's definitely part of it, that the men were having fun and doing the interesting things but also, I don't know, I'm just thinking more about gender and how maybe in some way I am more of a boy than a girl. — Alison Bechdel

I started to get bored with that stuff about only drawing men and I've taken it out of the slideshow. — Alison Bechdel

For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me. — Alison Bechdel

My research was stimulating but solitary — Alison Bechdel

In this pause, I suddenly saw something very clearly.
Whatever it was I wanted from my mother was simply not there to be had. It was not her fault.
And it was therefore not my fault that I was unable to elicit it. — Alison Bechdel

It was a vicious circle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew. Our home was like an artists' colony. We ate together, but otherwise were absorbed in our separate pursuits. And in this isolation, our creativity took on an aspect of compulsion. — Alison Bechdel

The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence. — Alison Bechdel

Mostly it was Mad magazine. And I did read a lot of - I had a subscription when I was little, but I also had access to some old collections, the little paperbacks of the really good stuff. — Alison Bechdel

It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone. — Alison Bechdel

Although I am good at enumerating my father's flaws, it's hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he's dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than it is for mothers. — Alison Bechdel

I'll watch a movie only if it meets the following criteria: 1. It has to have at least two women in it. 2. Who talk to each other. 3. About something besides a man. — Alison Bechdel

Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated. — Alison Bechdel

Perhaps I identify too well with my father's illicit awe. A trace of this seems caught in the photo, just as a trace of Roy has been caught on the light-sensitive paper ... It's a curiously ineffectual attempt at censorship. Why cross out the year and not the month? Why, for that matter, leave the photo in the envelope at all?
In an act of prestidigitation typical of the way my father juggled his public appearance and private reality, the evidence is simultaneously hidden and revealed. — Alison Bechdel

The secret subversive goal of my work is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings. — Alison Bechdel

Watching everyone root through their psyche, it just delights me. Especially R. Crumb's stuff. — Alison Bechdel

She has given me a way out. — Alison Bechdel

And partly, the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me. — Alison Bechdel

At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me.
I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then — Alison Bechdel

When I grew up, I studied karate for years. I got pretty strong, but eventually I had to acknowledge that I really didn't like fighting at all, so I quit. — Alison Bechdel

Then there were those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure? — Alison Bechdel

Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them. — Alison Bechdel

That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project. — Alison Bechdel

It's said, after all, that people reach middle age the day they realize they're never going to read Remembrance of Things Past. — Alison Bechdel

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity — Alison Bechdel

My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta.
But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset - from salmon to canary to midnight blue - left him wordless. — Alison Bechdel

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief. — Alison Bechdel

I don't know, maybe it's because I was raised Catholic. Confession has always held a great appeal for me. — Alison Bechdel

My homosexuality remained at that point purely theoretical, an untested hypothesis. But it was a hypothesise so thorough and so convincing I saw no reason not to share it immediately. — Alison Bechdel

If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body. — Alison Bechdel

The idea that our unconscious possesses such sure aim excited me. I became more attuned to my own erroneously carried out actions. — Alison Bechdel

I love Jules Feiffer. I didn't discover him until I was a little older. — Alison Bechdel

Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now. — Alison Bechdel

I probably read Harriet the Spy about 70,000 times. — Alison Bechdel

The sudden approximation of my dull, provincial life to a New Yorker cartoon was exhilarating. — Alison Bechdel

What would happen if we spoke the truth? — Alison Bechdel