Alison Bechdel > Quotes

“Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief.”
― 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, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“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, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“It was a vicious cycle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“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, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama

“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, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama

“Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“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, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“What would happen if we spoke the truth?”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“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, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.”
― Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama

“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, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!”
― Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama

“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, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“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, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story.”
― Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama

“Again, the troubling gap between word and meaning. My feeble language skills could not bear the weight of such a laden experience.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“She has given me a way out.”
― 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, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama

“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

“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

“Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“But how could he admire Joyce’s lengthy, libidinal ‘yes’ so fervently and end up saying ‘no’ to his own life? 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, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“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.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“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.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic