Alison Bechdel Quotes

Perhaps I'm being histrionic, trying to displace my actual grief with this imaginary trauma.

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

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

...did that require such a leap of the imagination? Perhaps affectation can be so thoroughgoing, so authentic in its details, that it stops being pretense… and becomes, for all practical purposes, real.

For anyone but the landed gentry to refer to a room in their house as 'the library' might seem affected. But there really was no other word for it.

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

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.

I have never read Sylvia Plath. My mother has never read Virginia Woolf. In general, we have stayed out of one another's way like this.

Toni: Well... straight couples get respect when they marry. Maybe we need to make some kind of symbolic affirmation of our commitment to one another!
Clarice: You mean...
Toni: Yes! Let's open a joint checking account!
Clarice: Oh, darling! But this is so sudden!

Life many gay people of my generation, I would not behave like a teenager until I was in my twenties.

Language gets very confusing as it approaches this place where outside and inside touch.

Raffi: Well, um, Taylor said only girls wear nail polish and so I, so I said but I'm a boy and I'm wearing nail polish, and so you're wrong!
Clarice: Raffi, I'm proud of you! That was a very smart thing to say!
Raffi: And then I kicked him.

The maples had sheltered the west side of our house for over a hundred years, and left, as fallen trees do, a void so absolute you couldn't possibly have imagined it beforehand.

"Every one' of the psychoanalytic trainees she [Alice Miller] has supervised has the same history:

An insecure parent who did not appear to be insecure, but who depended on the child behaving in a particular way.

And an 'amazing ability' on the part of the child to perceive this and take on the assigned role.

"This role secured 'love' for the child-that is, his parents' narcissistic cathexis. He could sense he was needed and this, he felt, guaranteed him a measure of existential...[as quoted by Alice Miller]

Whatever was going on between my parents, I suppose that my fantasy of self-sufficiency, my heavy investment in my own mind, is also a kind of narcissistic cathexis.