Alison Bechdel Quotes

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?

Most people don't even try to get what they want because of the painful reckoning with their parents it entails.

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.

Harriet: [making an excuse] Um... I'm looking for a copy of The Wheat-Free Guide to Creative Visualization in Co-dependent Past-Life Relationships.
Mo: Huh. Jeez, I never heard of that one... Wonder if it's in spirituality or cooking.

Our games of baseball — already lethargic affairs — would grind to a half as soon as the ball rolled near a perennial border.

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.

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?

"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.

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

Jezanna: Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chain store jobs!

Four years after my father's death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation i would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me.

Thea: Didja make your quota, Lois?
Lois: Yup. Kissed a woman from every state in the union. Rhode Island was a drag queen, though. Do you think that counts?

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.

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

"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"