Alison Bechdel Quotes

She has given me a way out. ~ Alison Bechdel

It's definitely part of it, that the men were having fun and doing the interesting things but also, I don't know, I'm just thinking more about gender and how maybe in some way I am more of a boy than a girl. ~ Alison Bechdel

I don't know, maybe it's because I was raised Catholic. Confession has always held a great appeal for me. ~ Alison Bechdel

Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them. ~ Alison Bechdel

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

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

When I grew up, I studied karate for years. I got pretty strong, but eventually I had to acknowledge that I really didn't like fighting at all, so I quit. ~ Alison Bechdel

The most sturdy nouns fell to faint approximations under my pen. ~ Alison Bechdel

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

My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up. ~ Alison Bechdel

When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults. ~ Alison Bechdel

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. ~ Alison Bechdel

Don't you kids get any ideas about dragging a trailer into the backyard. after you graduate from high school, i don't want to see you again. ~ Alison Bechdel

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

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. ~ Alison Bechdel

I guess I felt like I'd failed her [by throwing up]. She had so many demands on her...The one thing she needed from me was that I not need anything from her [Bechdel's mother]. ~ Alison Bechdel

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. ~ Alison Bechdel

I get a lot of mail from men who really identify with Stuart, you know, Sparrow's boyfriend. I love that. Even though I used to say I wanted men to read the strip even though there weren't any men in it, so they'd be forced to identify with the women. ~ Alison Bechdel

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. ~ Alison Bechdel

Watching everyone root through their psyche, it just delights me. Especially R. Crumb's stuff. ~ Alison Bechdel

I love Jules Feiffer. I didn't discover him until I was a little older. ~ Alison Bechdel

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

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. ~ Alison Bechdel

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief. ~ Alison Bechdel

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

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. ~ Alison Bechdel

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

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

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. ~ Alison Bechdel

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. ~ Alison Bechdel

Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated. ~ Alison Bechdel

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. ~ Alison Bechdel

Perhaps I identify too well with my father's illicit awe. A trace of this seems caught in the photo, just as a trace of Roy has been caught on the light-sensitive paper ... It's a curiously ineffectual attempt at censorship. Why cross out the year and not the month? Why, for that matter, leave the photo in the envelope at all?
In an act of prestidigitation typical of the way my father juggled his public appearance and private reality, the evidence is simultaneously hidden and revealed. ~ Alison Bechdel

Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now. ~ Alison Bechdel

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

...did that require such a leap of the imagination? Perhaps affectation can be so thoroughgoing, so authentic in its details, that it stops being pretense… and becomes, for all practical purposes, real. ~ Alison Bechdel

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

Although I'm 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 for mothers. ~ Alison Bechdel

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

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

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

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

I'm pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history. ~ Alison Bechdel

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

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity ~ Alison Bechdel

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

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

Whatever we say, we're always talking about ourselves. ~ Alison Bechdel

I just met someone who read Gone With the Wind 62 times for exactly that same reason. She couldn't bear that it wasn't real. She wanted to live in it. ~ Alison Bechdel

The sudden approximation of my dull, provincial life to a New Yorker cartoon was exhilarating. ~ Alison Bechdel

I just have this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and I work really hard at promoting myself. ~ Alison Bechdel

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

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

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. ~ Alison Bechdel

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. ~ Alison Bechdel

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. ~ Alison Bechdel

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

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. ~ Alison Bechdel

That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project. ~ Alison Bechdel

Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice. ~ Alison Bechdel

Punishment symptoms Many of the other types of programming produce psychiatric symptoms, usually administered as punishments by insiders who are trained to administer them, if the survivor has breached security or disobeyed the abusers' instructions in other ways. These symptoms serve a variety of purposes, such as disrupting therapy, getting the survivor into hospital, or getting the survivor to return to the perpetrators to have the programming reinforced.
p126 ~ Alison Miller

It's not your fault there is evil in the world Cadvan to Maerad ~ Alison Croggon

I am a result of what has happened on this planet - how could I find the art to say that? I can't, and yet, I am drawn to it because of the enormity of it. That seems really important. ~ Alison Hawthorne Deming

I'm addicted to a really tough workout. I like to be drenched in sweat when I'm done because I feel accomplished. ~ Alison Sweeney

I always wanted to play a mental patient. I was fascinated with playing crazy people in college, and I don't know if I ever quite perfected it. ~ Alison Brie

In this delicate and unpredictable life, the future is unwritten. Do not take someone for granted today, for once tomorrow dawns upon the indigo night the only remaining trace will be tracks in the sand... ~ Virginia Alison

All the fears and doubts surrounding her grief and regrets were swept up into the tempest of the music, poising here in the centre of the moment, a clear vessel of joy. ~ Alison Croggon

Biology textbooks tell you the opposite action of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. One produces cold, blue-white anger, the other flushed apoplexy. Roy's was the pink sort. He was a big blonde man, with Viking bristle to eyebrows and mustache. ~ Alison Jolly

I think my cat is adorable, and I probably give it too much fresh chicken. Maybe if I had a child, I'd be giving the chicken to the child. ~ Alison Goldfrapp

I love the sound you make when you're silent. ~ Alison Bliss

It's not weird to look at yourself in the mirror at the gym - that's why they're there! You have to make sure that you're doing things right. ~ Alison Sweeney

The religious imagery and fairytales that formed our shared cultural references have been replaced by the cult of celebrity. Marilyn is the sex goddess, Camilla Parker Bowles is cast as the wicked witch, Che Guevara is the revolutionary. Celebrities have become visual shorthand for narratives that shape our lives. ~ Alison Jackson

The love we hold sees no boundaries, it feels no limits, it crosses all frontiers. It can enrich us or send us spiralling to the deepest fathoms and if it is true, it can cross oceans and climb mountains, blind to race, creed and colour...It is a beautiful thing, this thing that claims our hearts. ~ Virginia Alison

In most places and times in human history, babies have had not just one person but lots of people around who were really paying attention to them around, dedicated to them, cared to them, were related to them. I think the big shift in our culture is the isolation in which many children are growing up. ~ Alison Gopnik

Joy bubbles on a fountain of doubt.-Alison Croggon ~ Alison Croggon

It is too dangerous to meddle in the marriage of princes,' he muttered as he withdrew. Arundel made a joke at his expense, saying 'He lost his post as Chancellor that day, for the Queen had usurped it,' which drew wry laughter from the deputation. ~ Alison Weir

Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers. ~ Alison Gopnik

In a very slow way, I found my path. Even now, I think, 'If I can't do it my way, I'd rather not do it.' ~ Alison Goldfrapp

My big chip is that I never had an education. I wanted my children to get one so they didn't fall into the same trap as me. ~ Alison Moyet

I laughed. 'It's a cellar Phil, calling it your recording studio does not make that sentence any less creepy. ~ Alison Davis

Late in the 16th centurt, William Cecil's son, Thomas reortedthat Philip had said that 'whatever he suffered from Queen Elizabeth was the judgement of God because, being married to Queen Elizabeth, whom he though a most virtuous and good lady, yet in the fancy of love he could not affect her; but as for the Lady Elizabeth; he was enamored of her, being a fair and beautiful woman. ~ Alison Weir

People think, 'Oh, I'm loving myself by sitting on this sofa for four hours.' Love yourself enough to get up! ~ Alison Sweeney

Romy Madley Croft from the xx. Number two: Alison Moyet from Yaz. And number three: Johnette Napolitanos from Concrete Blonde. ~ Kim Holden

Humans have always used animals to depict ideas about themselves: ideas about their status, about their position in life and society and the world. ~ Alison Goldfrapp

To imagine wasn't to escape but to go deeper; to see through to the secret life of the world. ~ Alison MacLeod

Instead of thinking that's a nice tune, you start thinking is it the right pace, is it the right tempo? That is the death nell for artists. ~ Alison Moyet

Brushing the clouds away from my eyes, I see clarity in the raindrop and beauty in the first ray of morning sun...
Life is strange and wondrous... ~ Virginia Alison

My style of singing has always been referred to 'soul' singing when it fact it's more influenced by English R&B Blues Shouting. I'm closer to Led Zeppelin as a vocalist than to Ella Fitzgerald. It was torture dealing with major labels. ~ Alison Moyet

I don't have any trouble believing that you would avoid something seemingly perfect because you're in something you really want to prove to yourself you can do right. ~ Alison Pill

The dream that I've been having, about my high-school sweetheart, is not really about my high-school sweetheart, when you get right down to it. It's not a dream about Alison Koechner and our lost love and the precious little three-bedroom house in Maine we might have built together, had things gone a different way. I am not dreaming of white picket fences and Sunday crosswords and warm tea.
There's no asteroid in the dream. In the dream, life continues. Simple life, happy and white-picket lined or otherwise. Mere life. Goes on.
When I'm dreaming of Alison Koechner, what I'm dreaming of is not dying. ~ Ben H. Winters

'True Detective' would not pass The Bechdel Test. ~ Cary Fukunaga

What am I searching for? Maybe its the beliefs I had as a child, that the world is a nice place, that people are genuinely who they say they are, that life is not simply what it is, where the sun shines and the stars glitter for me. Where am I going? I do not know but maybe I am just searching for those beliefs that lead to a happy ending... ~ Virginia Alison

Ignore the world when it forgets to tell you that you are beautiful...A goddess needs no reminding... ~ Virginia Alison

Until quite recently women's histories were largely overlooked but in the wake of feminism there has been increasing interest in retrieving them. ~ Alison Weir

I had always loved Noah. It was something I did naturally, without thinking, like breathing ~ Alison G. Bailey

I've met so many fans of daytime television who've watched the shows with their moms and grandmas and feel like they've known the characters their whole lives. It's sad for them to have to say goodbye to their favorite soaps and characters. We don't want that to happen to the 'Days' fans. ~ Alison Sweeney

It is good to dress in fair clothes to dine with friends. It honors your host, if you are a guest; and your guest if you are a host. And both adorn the feast, and so celebrate the gifts of the world. ~ Alison Croggon

I've actually suffered from allergies my entire life. My mom had allergies, so I was aware of what an issue they can be. Many people allow their allergies to affect their lives. As a mom with two kids and two jobs, I just can't let allergies slow me down. It's a day to day thing that can really be remedied by finding the right medication. ~ Alison Sweeney

Well, anyway Rita, I have to run, some, uh, Bechdel tests on your jacket. ~ Hiroshi Sakurazaka

At school, up to the age of sixteen, I found history boring, for we were studying the Industrial Revolution, which was all about Acts, Trade Unions and the factory system, and I wanted to know about people, because it is people who make history. ~ Alison Weir