Quotes from Alison Bechdel

I never really read superhero stuff as a kid.

Partly I resented being perceived as weak because I was a girl.

But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.

One of them is already having some menopausal symptoms. I'm working on that. I'm giving them all little lines under the eyes, trying to sort of make them age gracefully.

Does "anal-retentive" have a hyphen?

But mostly, it's a book about my relationship with my father.

And partly, the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me.

Political is personal; personal is political. I never was a political person until I realized I was a lesbian. I was this oblivious middle-class white kid who didn't understand the powers of oppression or structure or anything. My very existence became politicized for me and that's what enabled me to see all these things. It wasn't just me, it was a whole cultural movement that was also doing those things that I was a part of.

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief.

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.

Then there were those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure?

It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.

It was a vicious cycle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew.

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

In a narcissistic cathexis, you invest more energy into your ideas about another person than in the actual, objective, external person. So the man who falls in love with beauty is quite different from the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her.

In this pause, I suddenly saw something very clearly. Whatever it was I wanted from my mother was simply not there to be had. It was not her fault. And it was therefore not my fault that I was unable to elicit it.

Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice.

What would happen if we spoke the truth?

At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me. I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then

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

My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta. But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset - from salmon to canary to midnight blue - left him wordless.

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

If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.

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.