It certainly was an important moment for me, that realization that I was not going to get what I wanted. It was very freeing. I keep using that word "freeing" or "liberating." I feel like Houdini sometimes, like I'm just getting out of one set of shackles after another, hanging upside down inside a burlap bag with handcuffs on. Hopefully one day, I'm going to get out of this tank of water.

Alison Bechdel

Categorized in : Water Important One Day

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

erotic shame kind

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

Alison Bechdel

goal secret shows

The writing is hard, and the drawing is fun. It's very satisfying to see a drawing start to come together.

Alison Bechdel

drawing writing fun

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

falling-in-love girl beautiful

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

Alison Bechdel

design grief sea

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

reading book thinking

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

movie men two

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

Alison Bechdel

body mind desire

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

sunset blow father

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

Alison Bechdel

confession appeals catholic

I'm not that good of a drawer. I don't know how people just draw stuff out of their head. I'm always creating schemes. If I have to draw someone sitting in a chair, I have to go find a chair, sit in it, and take a picture of myself sitting in it.

Alison Bechdel

people

I wish I had a typical workday. I struggle to get up at seven and almost always fail. I just try to get to my office as soon as I can, but it's always later than I would like.

Alison Bechdel

office struggle wish

It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!

Alison Bechdel

consciousness capacity self

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

Alison Bechdel

father children way

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

Alison Bechdel

girl weak

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

my-family self needs

Well, I'm always working on my comic strip and trying to, you know, keep cranking that out.

Alison Bechdel

always-working comic trying

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

bars mother father

For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.

Alison Bechdel

drawing reason writing

Nancy Drew was always changing her outfits. I despised girls' clothing, I couldn't wait to get home from school and get out of it. The last thing I wanted to read was minute descriptions of Nancy's frocks.

Alison Bechdel

girl home school