Alison Bechdel

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

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

“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.”

“How Horrid" has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror--puberty, public disgrace--then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing.”

“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.”

“She has given me a way out.”

“What would happen if we spoke the truth?”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?”

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The sudden approximation of my dull, provincial life to a New Yorker cartoon was exhilarating.”