Alison Bechdel Quotes

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

If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.

What's lost in translation is the complexity of loss itself.

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 smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.

Ginger: Oh, jeez. Well, uh... maybe you should talk to someone.
Cynthia: I thought I was.

I did not draw a conscious parallel to my own sexuality, much less my father's. But the immersion — like green dishwashing liquid bathing a cuticle — left me supple and open to possibility.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Sydney: Imagine the cinematography if Ennis and Jack had been able to live together. Sweeping vistas of their couples therapist's office.

It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.

She has given me a way out.

"In his 1964 talk on feminism, Winnicott says something he's been saying all along. "...We find that the trouble is not so much that everyone was inside and then born, but that at the very beginning everyone was dependent on a woman." Winnicott sees this dependence as the root of misogyny — though he never uses that word. Perhaps, like Woolf with "feminism," he felt plain language was more persuasive. "The awkward fact remains, for men and women, that each was once dependent on a woman, and somehow a hatred of this has to be turned into a kind of gratitude if full maturity of the personality is to be reached.