Quotes from Alison Bechdel

It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!

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.

Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?

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.

It's said, after all, that people reach middle age the day they realize they're never going to read Remembrance of Things Past.

Again, the troubling gap between word and meaning. My feeble language skills could not bear the weight of such a laden experience.

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.

She has given me a way out.

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.

It was a vicious circle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew. Our home was like an artists' colony. We ate together, but otherwise were absorbed in our separate pursuits. And in this isolation, our creativity took on an aspect of compulsion.

But how could he admire Joyce's lengthy, libidinal 'yes' so fervently and end up saying 'no' to his own life? 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.

Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.

Your unconscious wants to express the pain you feel about your own lost innocence. But your ego wants to keep it repressed. To the compromise is anxiety.

On our second date, she kissed me in a bar. I invited her home. We just caught the F train, which seemed like a good omen.

Even drawing gray hair at all is difficult to render in black and white.

For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.

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.

Gatsby's self-willed metamorphosis from farm boy to prince is many ways identical to my father's. Like Gatsby, my father fueled this transformation with the colossal vitality of his illusion. Unlike Gatsby he did this on a school teacher's salary.

In one way, what I saw in those mirrors was the self trapped inside the self, forever. But in another way, the self in the mirror was opening out, in an infinite unfurling. I am the one whose drive is being thwarted. And I am the one who is thwarting it.

My research was stimulating but solitary

Four years after my father's death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation i would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me.

How Horrid has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror--puberty, public disgrace--then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing.

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

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.