Alison Bechdel Quotes

American cartoonist, author

Alison Bechdel (born September 10, 1960) is an American cartoonist. She has written one of the best-known LGBT comic strips, Dykes to Watch Out For, for over 25 years. Her graphic memoir Fun Home was rated one of the best books of 2006.

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Alternative Names: Alison J. Bechdel

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

There are two ways to surpass your parents. Ones is to achieve the thing they had hoped for. One is somewhat easier: just to live longer.

I put the odds on a psychic deathmatch between Attila the Hun and Virginia Woolf at fifty-fifty.

My mother must have bathed me hundreds of times. But it's my father rinsing me off with the purple metal cup that I remember most clearly. The suffusion of warmth as the hot water sluiced over me...
...the sudden, unbearable cold of its absence.

Lois: Good coffee, huh?
Emma: Lois, I think you're a very attractive woman and I'd like to sleep with you.
Lois: [chokes] Gak! Ahem! You don't - coff - fool around, do you?
Emma: No, but I'd like to.

Maybe the mother manages to be a mirror only part of the time. In such 'tantalizing' cases, some babies learn to withdraw their own needs when the mother's are evident.

Mo: I wish it were me instead of you.
Sydney: Yeah. I'm getting the sodium pentothal. You have to go sit with my parents.

I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy

The only thing to transcend is the idea that there's something to transcend. Nirvana is samsara. I finally got the memo.

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

She has given me a way out.

Mo: Uh... sorry. I was just wondering why you're... you know... using that if normally you just use crutches.
Thea: Well, the chair is so much more dramatic, don't you think? I use it when I want people to feel extra sorry for me.

It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.

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

The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story.