Alison Bechdel Quotes

"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]

"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."

It's a world gone mad! Pacifists paying for boot camp! Feminists learning to pole dance! Geeks flipping tractor tires! And the trends keep coming!

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

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

Bookstore boss: [to Mo] The self-service kiosks have enabled us to cut down on staff, but some customers still feel the need to speak to an actual human. That's where you come in.
Customer: Excuse me, do you carry Jewish New Year cards?
Boss: I'm sorry, our New Years cards don't come in till November. But we'll be getting Jewish Christmas cards then, too!

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

I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it; two, two women talking to each other, and three, talking about something besides a man

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.

Miriam: Look, don't fixate on the due date. It's just an approximation. Only 5 percent of babies actually arrive on it. Most come later, in fact.
Clarice: Great! How much later? Two days? Three?
Miriam: Let me give you a friendly tip, Clarice. Don't get too hung up on keeping a tight schedule for the next, say, eighteen years or so.

Ginger: [hauling Clarice up stairs in a wheelchair]: This ivory tower needs some ramps!
Clarice: What are you saying, Ginger?! Build ramps and anyone could get up!! The whole school would be overrun by black commie dykes in wheelchairs! Really, now!

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.

I am not ultimately interested in writing fiction. I can't make things up. Or rather, I can only make things up about things that have already happened.

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.

What's lost in translation is the complexity of loss itself.