123 Quotes by Alison Bechdel

Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.

If it weren’t for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.

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

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

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.

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

I’m pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history.

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don’t know why that is important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.

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.