Alison Bechdel Quotes

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.

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

Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure

What would happen if we spoke the truth?

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

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief

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.

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.

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

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

It certainly was an important moment for me, that realization that I was not going to get what I wanted. It was very freeing. I keep using that word "freeing" or "liberating." I feel like Houdini sometimes, like I'm just getting out of one set of shackles after another, hanging upside down inside a burlap bag with handcuffs on. Hopefully one day, I'm going to get out of this tank of water.

The writing is hard, and the drawing is fun. It's very satisfying to see a drawing start to come together.

I'm not that good of a drawer. I don't know how people just draw stuff out of their head. I'm always creating schemes. If I have to draw someone sitting in a chair, I have to go find a chair, sit in it, and take a picture of myself sitting in it.

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that is 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.

Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I’m glad mainstream culture is starting to catch up to where lesbian-feminism was 30 years ago.

Basically, my work is play. It never actually feels that way - I'm always aiming to attain that state. But I get to do for a living what I did as a child for fun, and that's pretty cool.

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

I get to do for a living what I did as a child for fun, and that's pretty cool.