Alison Bechdel Quotes

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.

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.

My homosexuality remained at that point purely theoretical, an untested hypothesis. But it was a hypothesise so thorough and so convincing I saw no reason not to share it immediately.

It could be argued that death is inherently absurd, and that grinning is not necessarily an inappropriate response. I mean absurd in the sense of ridiculous, unreasonable. One second a person is there, the next they're not.

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.

"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."

Toni: Mamá... MAMÁ! I'm paying peak long-distance rates here. Could you save the Hail Marys until we hang up?

Alice Miller writes that the child who suppresses his own feelings in order to accomodate a parent has been, in a sense, abandoned.

'Later, when these feelings of being deserted begin to emerge in the analysis of the adult, they are accompanied by such intensity of pain and despair that it is quite clear that these people could not have survived so much pain. That would only have been possible in an empathic, attentive environment, and this they lacked. [as quoted by Alice Miller]'

She also says that the mother who requires accommodation from her child is just trying to get what her own mother refused her.

Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence streaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials... smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.

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!

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.

It’s true that he didn’t kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence steaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials... smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.

If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.

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

Or maybe he had gotten too inured to death, and was hoping to elicit from me an expression of the natural horror he was no longer capable of...I have made use of this technique myself, however, this attempts to access emotions vicariously...eager to detect in my listener that flinch of grief that eluded me.