Quotes from Alison Bechdel

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

There was a certain thing I did not get from my mother. There is a lack, a gap, a void. How's that? But in it's place, she has given me something else. Something, I would argue, that is far more valuable. I think I can get up now. She has given me the way out.

Life many gay people of my generation, I would not behave like a teenager until I was in my twenties.

It's true that he didn't kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. 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 steaming 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.

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.

Although I'm 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 for mothers.

Rich is not writing about transcending this world... But about transforming it. Here, and now. And what hope do we have of changing the world if we can't change our sorry-ass selves? As wisdom tends to do, the poem reveals something very simple that's been here all along: We are not the center of everything. But we are a part of everything.

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.

The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew... And in this isolation, our creativity took on an aspect of compulsion.

My mother must have bathed me hundreds of times. But it's my father rinsing me off with the purple metal cup that I remember most clearly. The suffusion of warmth as the hot water sluiced over me... ...the sudden, unbearable cold of its absence.

did that require such a leap of the imagination? Perhaps affectation can be so thoroughgoing, so authentic in its details, that it stops being pretense… and becomes, for all practical purposes, real.

Language gets very confusing as it approaches this place where outside and inside touch.

I didn't know there were women who wore men's clothes and had men's haircuts. But like a traveler in a foreign country who runs into someone from home - someone they've never spoken to but know by sight - I recognized her with a surge of joy.

Maybe the mother manages to be a mirror only part of the time. In such 'tantalizing' cases, some babies learn to withdraw their own needs when the mother's are evident.

I guess I felt like I'd failed her [by throwing up]. She had so many demands on her...The one thing she needed from me was that I not need anything from her [Bechdel's mother].

The most sturdy nouns fell to faint approximations under my pen.

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

The only thing to transcend is the idea that there's something to transcend. Nirvana is samsara. I finally got the memo.

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

Here's the vital core of Winnicott's theory: The subject must destroy the object. And the object must survive this destruction. If the object doesn't survive, it will remain internal, a projection of the subject's self. If the object survives destruction, the subject can see it as separate.

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

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.

There are two ways to surpass your parents. Ones is to achieve the thing they had hoped for. One is somewhat easier: just to live longer.

For anyone but the landed gentry to refer to a room in their house as 'the library' might seem affected. But there really was no other word for it.