Alison Bechdel Quotes

She has given me a way out.

Raffi: Okay, it's time to make another deposit to my therapy fund.

Cynthia: To be honest, I've been rethinking things lately. I mean, I'm still a Christian, but I'm definitely transitioning.
Janis: Really? Is your mom letting you do hormones? Mine won't.

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!

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.

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.

Mrs. Pidgeon: That little girl whose mother is in the, um, "threesome." Why do you say she's confused about her gender? She seems perfectly normal to me.
Sparrow: Mom, she's a boy.
Mrs. Pidgeon: Oh. Well then, I'm not quite so worried about that revealing top. I was going to speak to her mother.

Of course I’m delighted that Fun Home has met with such success, but it still strikes me as very unlikely that an odd, cerebral story about a lesbian and her closeted gay suicidal mortician father would have struck a chord with anyone but me.

Lois: Oh, you guys have enough to worry about with your careers and all. You don't need to hear about my problems.
Ginger: Are you kidding? I'd much rather hear about your problems than work on my dissertation.
Lois: Thank you, Ginger. Considering you'd rather fellate Bill Clinton than work on your dissertation, that's very generous.

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.

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

"I was adrift on the high seas, but my course was becoming clear. It lay between the scylla of my peers and the swirling, sucking charybdis of my family. Veering toward scylla seemed much the safer route, and after navigating the passage, I soon washed up, a bit stunned, on a new shore. Like Odysseus on the island of the cyclops, I found myself facing a "being of colossal strength and ferocity, to whom the law of man and god meant nothing." In true heroic fashion, I moved toward the thing I feared. Yet while Odysseus schemed desperately to escape Polyphemus's cave, I found that I was quite content to stay here forever."

Carlos: Manly-Man Training Academy, Butch speaking! … OH! Señor Ortiz! Sí, this is Toni's number. ...¿¡De qué estás hablando?! ¡No! I'm not the father! I'm just the babysitter, I swear! ¿Qué?! You want me to marry your daughter? Well okay, but I'm keeping my own name!

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

Psychoanalytic insight, Miller seems to suggest, is itself a pathological symptom.