Quotes from Alison Bechdel

What if Icarus hadn't hurtled into the sea? What if he'd inherited his parent's inventive bent? What might have wrought?

I remember feeling very angry at Betty Friedan. AB: What? Why? Well... she hated housework and wanted women to be independent, but then she's hire other women to do her housework.

But, Jocelyn, if I really were all those things [good, kind, talented, hard working, open to change, and adorable]... ...I would die.' I wasn't sure what I meant by this, but it suddenly struck me as the truth. 'Because you'd rather die than feel anger at your mother for not giving you what you needed?

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.

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

Perhaps I'm being histrionic, trying to displace my actual grief with this imaginary trauma.

This is one of my difficulties now... my fear that Mom will find this memoir about her angry. Another difficulty is the fact that the story of my mother and me is unfolding even as I write it.

I'm sure these things are true. But the way she says them feels like an implied criticism. As if she's comparing her own selflessness to my self-absorption. But of course that's just evidence of my self-absorption. My mother is probably not thinking anything like this. In fact, my desire to think that she's thinking of me at all is a bit pathetic.

Your anxiety attach in the church sounds like a compromise formation. A what? Your unconscious wants to express the pain you feel about your own lost innocense. But your ego wants to keep it repressed. So the compromise is anxiety.

Whatever was going on between my parents, I suppose that my fantasy of self-sufficiency, my heavy investment in my own mind, is also a kind of narcissistic cathexis.

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!

And woe betide the person with the 'double abnormality' of a false self and 'a fine intellect' that they find they can use to escape their pain. 'The world may observe academic success of a high degree, and may find it hard to believe in the very real distress of the individual concerned, who feels 'phoney' the more he or she is successful. [as quoted by Winnicott]

Over the course of my life, as I have made my Houdini-like escapes from one self-imposed constraint after another, a question haunts me with increasing insistence. How many levels does this game have?

I did not draw a conscious parallel to my own sexuality, much less my father's. But the immersion -- like green dishwashing liquid bathing a cuticle -- left me supple and open to possibility.

My transformation, thanks in part to Adrienne Rich, was easier than hers had been.

No solo éramos invertidos, éramos inversiones el uno del otro

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 smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.

Dicen que el dolor adopta muchas formas, incluyendo la ausencia del dolor.

Why have I spent so many hours of my life--very possibly as many as are actually recommended-- exercising ?!

The idea that I caused his death by telling my parents I was a lesbian is perhaps illogical. Causality implies connection, contact of some kind. And however convincing they might be, you can't lay hands on a fictional character.

on Stonewall Inn] And while I acknowledge the absurdity of claiming a connection to that mythologized flashpoint...might not a lingering vibration, a quantum of rebellion, still have hung in the humectant air?

From their example, I learnt quickly to feed myself. It was a vicious circle, though. The more gratification we found in our geniuses, the more isolated we grew...And indeed, if our family was a sort of artists' colony, could it not be even more accurately described as a mildly autistic colony? Our selves were all we had.

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.