123 Quotes by 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

The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story.

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.

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

But how could he admire Joyce’s lengthy, libidinal ‘yes’ so fervently and end up saying ‘no’ to his own life? 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.

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.

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.

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

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