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 steaming 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

Alison Bechdel Quotes

Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.

— Alison Bechdel

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.

— Alison Bechdel

It could be argued that death is inherently absurd, and that grinning is not necessarily an inappropriate response. I mean absurd in the sense of ridiculous, unreasonable. One second a person is there, the next they’re not.

— Alison Bechdel

Whatever we say, we’re always talking about ourselves.

— Alison Bechdel

Maybe the mother manages to be a mirror only part of the time. In such ‘tantalizing’ cases, some babies learn to withdraw their own needs when the mother’s are evident.

— Alison Bechdel

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 steaming 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

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

Language gets very confusing as it approaches this place where outside and inside touch.

— Alison Bechdel

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

— Alison Bechdel

I put the odds on a psychic deathmatch between Attila the Hun and Virginia Woolf at fifty-fifty.

— Alison Bechdel

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.

— Alison Bechdel

Life many gay people of my generation, I would not behave like a teenager until I was in my twenties.

— 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?

— Alison Bechdel

The only thing to transcend is the idea that there’s something to transcend. Nirvana is samsara. I finally got the memo.

— Alison Bechdel

The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew... And in this isolation, our creativity took on an aspect of compulsion.

— Alison Bechdel

I didn’t know there were women who wore men’s clothes and had men’s haircuts. But like a traveler in a foreign country who runs into someone from home – someone they’ve never spoken to but know by sight – I recognized her with a surge of joy.

— Alison Bechdel

There are two ways to surpass your parents. Ones is to achieve the thing they had hoped for. One is somewhat easier: just to live longer.

— Alison Bechdel

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.

— Alison Bechdel

My parents seemed almost embarrassed by the fact of their marriage. There was no story, for example, of how they met.

— Alison Bechdel

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

— Alison Bechdel
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