Alison Bechdel Quotes

Your anxiety attach in the church sounds like a compromise formation.

A what?

Your unconscious wants to express the pain you feel about your own lost innocense. But your ego wants to keep it repressed. So the compromise is anxiety.

Sydney: [proposing to Mo] Will you do me the honor of paradoxically reinscribing and destabilizing hegemonic discourse with me?

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.

But, Jocelyn, if I really were all those things [good, kind, talented, hard working, open to change, and adorable]... ...I would die.'

I wasn't sure what I meant by this, but it suddenly struck me as the truth.

'Because you'd rather die than feel anger at your mother for not giving you what you needed?

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.

Sparrow: Listen, Mo. I have been doing crisis intervention with battered, homeless women and kids all week long. Tonight, I am going to vegetate in front of the TV. If you're so worried about Bosnia, go join the Red Cross.

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?

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

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

Clarice: [proposing to Toni] I'll be your lawyer if you'll be my accountant.

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.

Lois: Hey, Ginger! Are you masturbating in there or what? I wanna show you something!
Ginger: [in the tub] If I'm masturbating, will you leave me alone?
Lois: No! Check it out. How do I look?
Ginger: Like a white girl in a black bra.

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.

Miriam: Look, don't fixate on the due date. It's just an approximation. Only 5 percent of babies actually arrive on it. Most come later, in fact.
Clarice: Great! How much later? Two days? Three?
Miriam: Let me give you a friendly tip, Clarice. Don't get too hung up on keeping a tight schedule for the next, say, eighteen years or so.

Sparrow: If you'd get a vasectomy, we wouldn't have to go through this every time.
Stuart: But... but you know I want to have a baby eventually.
Sparrow: So make some deposits at a sperm bank first. Then we can inseminate like normal people when we're ready.