Alison Bechdel Quotes

I'm sure these things are true. But the way she says them feels like an implied criticism. As if she's comparing her own selflessness to my self-absorption. But of course that's just evidence of my self-absorption. My mother is probably not thinking anything like this. In fact, my desire to think that she's thinking of me at all is a bit pathetic.

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?

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.

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

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.

And in a way, you could say that my father's end was my beginning...Or more precisely, that the end of his lie coincided with the beginning of my truth

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.

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

Mo: My sister-in-law had her baby! I'm an aunt! My brother's a father! My mother's a grandma! My dad's a...
Sydney: I think I can generalize from there.

Clarice: [getting cold feet] There's still time!
Toni: We can just call everyone and say we're terribly sorry but something came up and we have to leave town!
Clarice: ...But what about the five gallons of baba ganoush, and all those tofu pups?
Toni: Shit. I forgot. Well, I guess we'll just have to go through with it, then.

Mo: Clarice, you've gotta reconcile your feelings about leaving the neighborhood. It's not Ginger you're attracted to, it's what she represents. The co-op, the park, the block festival, the community!
Clarice: Oh, so it's really the community's inner thighs I want to drizzle with maple crème anglaise, which I then slowly lap up while straddling the tantalizing tongue of the co-op.

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

I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it; two, two women talking to each other, and three, talking about something besides a man

Nurse: Ker... Kru... Crutchoffski, breast conservation? How are we feeling?
Sydney: A bit like an endangered wetland.

"This is one of my difficulties now... my fear that Mom will find this memoir about her "angry." Another difficulty is the fact that the story of my mother and me is unfolding even as I write it."