Top 70 Alison Bechdel Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!”

— Alison Bechdel

2. “Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure.”

— Alison Bechdel

3. “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.”

— Alison Bechdel

4. “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.”

— Alison Bechdel

5. “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

6. “Although I am 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 it is for mothers.”

— Alison Bechdel

7. “I just have this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and I work really hard at promoting myself.”

— Alison Bechdel

8. “Yeah, I read Judy Blume. My mother didn’t like that, but I read it anyhow.”

— Alison Bechdel

9. “Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief.”

— Alison Bechdel

10. “I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity.”

— Alison Bechdel

11. “I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.”

— Alison Bechdel

12. “What would happen if we spoke the truth?”

— Alison Bechdel

13. “Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.”

— Alison Bechdel

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

— Alison Bechdel

15. “Your unconscious wants to express the pain you feel about your own lost innocence. But your ego wants to keep it repressed. To the compromise is anxiety.”

— Alison Bechdel

16. “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

17. “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

18. “Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice.”

— Alison Bechdel

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

— Alison Bechdel

20. “You can’t live and write at the same time.”

— Alison Bechdel

21. “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

22. “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

23. “The secret subversive goal of my work is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings.”

— Alison Bechdel

24. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

25. “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

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

— Alison Bechdel

27. “I’ll watch a movie only if it meets the following criteria: 1. It has to have at least two women in it. 2. Who talk to each other. 3. About something besides a man.”

— Alison Bechdel

28. “And partly, the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me.”

— Alison Bechdel

29. “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

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

— Alison Bechdel

31. “Whatever we say, we’re always talking about ourselves.”

— Alison Bechdel

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

— Alison Bechdel

33. “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

34. “Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?”

— Alison Bechdel

35. “Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.”

— Alison Bechdel

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

— Alison Bechdel

37. “Even drawing gray hair at all is difficult to render in black and white.”

— Alison Bechdel

38. “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

39. “But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.”

— Alison Bechdel

40. “I’m glad mainstream culture is starting to catch up to where lesbian-feminism was 30 years ago.”

— Alison Bechdel

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

— Alison Bechdel

42. “I never really read superhero stuff as a kid.”

— Alison Bechdel

43. “Watching everyone root through their psyche, it just delights me. Especially R. Crumb’s stuff.”

— Alison Bechdel

44. “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

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

— Alison Bechdel

46. “She has given me a way out.”

— Alison Bechdel

47. “The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence.”

— Alison Bechdel

48. “Partly I resented being perceived as weak because I was a girl.”

— Alison Bechdel

49. “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

50. “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.”

— Alison Bechdel

Featured in: Reading Quotes