Alison Bechdel Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“The secret subversive goal of my work is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Goal #Secret #Shows

“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.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Kind #Shame #Lifetime

“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.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Beautiful #Girl #Falling In Love

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

#Mind #Desire #Body

“Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Grief #Sea #Design

“Although I am good at enumerating my father’s flaws, it’s hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he’s dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than it is for mothers.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Mother #Father #Bars

“You can't live and write at the same time.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Writing

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

#Sex #Odds #Expression

“I’m glad mainstream culture is starting to catch up to where lesbian-feminism was 30 years ago.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Years #Feminism #Culture

“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.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Self #Needs #My Family

“Well, I'm always working on my comic strip and trying to, you know, keep cranking that out.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Trying #Comic #Wells

“I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Children #Father #Way

“I'll watch a movie only if it meets the following criteria: 1. It has to have at least two women in it. 2. Who talk to each other. 3. About something besides a man.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Movie #Men #Two

“It's a hard thing to age a character because you can't really suddenly give someone gray hair.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Character #Hair #Giving

“It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Self #Consciousness #Capacity

“It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Life Changing #Home #Gone

“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.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Father #Sunset #Blow

“I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Criticism #Found #Stills

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

#Genius #Grew #Vicious

“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”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Book #Class #Firsts

“What would happen if we spoke the truth?”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Spokes

“She has given me a way out.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Way #Given

“If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Father #Proust #Bigger

“Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Grief #Absence #Form

“I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Drama #Parent #Tragedy

“I started to get bored with that stuff about only drawing men and I've taken it out of the slideshow.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Taken #Men #Drawing

“Mostly it was Mad magazine. And I did read a lot of - I had a subscription when I was little, but I also had access to some old collections, the little paperbacks of the really good stuff.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Mad #Magazines #Littles

“Nancy Drew was always changing her outfits. I despised girls' clothing, I couldn't wait to get home from school and get out of it. The last thing I wanted to read was minute descriptions of Nancy's frocks.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Girl #Home #School

“Partly I resented being perceived as weak because I was a girl.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Girl #Weak

“Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.”
-- Alison Bechdel

#Writing #Drawing #Wish