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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

My parents seemed almost embarrassed by the fact of their marriage. There was no story, for example, of how they met.

Perhaps I identify too well with my father's illicit awe. A trace of this seems caught in the photo, just as a trace of Roy has been caught on the light-sensitive paper...It's a curiously ineffectual attempt at censorship. Why cross out the year and not the month? Why, for that matter, leave the photo in the envelope at all?

In an act of prestidigitation typical of the way my father juggled his public appearance and private reality, the evidence is simultaneously hidden and revealed.

From their example, I learnt quickly to feed myself. It was a vicious circle, though. The more gratification we found in our geniuses, the more isolated we grew...And indeed, if our family was a sort of artists' colony, could it not be even more accurately described as a mildly autistic colony? Our selves were all we had.

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 guess I felt like I'd failed her [by throwing up]. She had so many demands on her...The one thing she needed from me was that I not need anything from her [Bechdel's mother].

Mo: Thanks for the lentils! I have to go home now and rethink my priorities!

"There was a certain thing I did not get from my mother.

There is a lack, a gap, a void.

"How's that?"

But in it's place, she has given me something else.

Something, I would argue, that is far more valuable.

"I think I can get up now."

She has given me the way out."

Mo: Thank you, Jillian, for that fascinating, uh, transsexual version of the Oedipus legend, "Oedipal Complex."