Search quotes

Link	Quote	Tags	Author
20b42fe	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.	truth homosexuality shame	Alison Bechdel
4408126	It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.	home	Alison Bechdel
6c9569f	Then there were those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure?		Alison Bechdel
74fe1fa	It was a vicious cycle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew.		Alison Bechdel
541cd8e	I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy		Alison Bechdel
22f2a8d	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.	truth narcissism	Alison Bechdel
fbdc270	I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity		Alison Bechdel
1925777	In this pause, I suddenly saw something very clearly. Whatever it was I wanted from my mother was simply not there to be had. It was not her fault. And it was therefore not my fault that I was unable to elicit it.		Alison Bechdel
43f0084	What would happen if we spoke the truth?		Alison Bechdel
9595bc6	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"	literary-criticism university	Alison Bechdel
219ce92	It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.	homosexuality	Alison Bechdel
bc346df	Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice.	feminism theory lesbianism practice	Alison Bechdel
c3d0bda	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
bd3c2fb	If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.		Alison Bechdel
64901a3	It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!	psychological-insight	Alison Bechdel
70fb111	My homosexuality remained at that point purely theoretical, an untested hypothesis. But it was a hypothesise so thorough and so convincing I saw no reason not to share it immediately.		Alison Bechdel
a35c45a	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.		Alison Bechdel
103d327	If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.	queer	Alison Bechdel
5c5bedb	It's said, after all, that people reach middle age the day they realize they're never going to read Remembrance of Things Past.		Alison Bechdel
61b6257	Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?	humor	Alison Bechdel
bd28b71	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
ee8041e	Again, the troubling gap between word and meaning. My feeble language skills could not bear the weight of such a laden experience.		Alison Bechdel
2391bf2	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.	writing	Alison Bechdel
6cfd904	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.		Alison Bechdel
e57b039	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.	sex	Alison Bechdel
669cd65	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.	unconscious therapy mothers-and-daughters	Alison Bechdel
ddb2d3b	I have never read Sylvia Plath. My mother has never read Virginia Woolf. In general, we have stayed out of one another's way like this.		Alison Bechdel
ea9fb60	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."	illusion gatsbypoor school-teacher rich	Alison Bechdel
dffe9d1	Psychoanalytic insight, Miller seems to suggest, is itself a pathological symptom.	psychoanalysis	Alison Bechdel
8ad572c	The sudden approximation of my dull, provincial life to a New Yorker cartoon was exhilarating.		Alison Bechdel
6faa058	My research was stimulating but solitary		Alison Bechdel
4ebfbdf	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."	rhetoric perspective	Alison Bechdel
6771491	Every one' of the psychoanalytic trainees she [Alice Miller] has supervised has the same history: An insecure parent who did not appear to be insecure, but who depended on the child behaving in a particular way. And an 'amazing ability' on the part of the child to perceive this and take on the assigned role. "This role secured 'love' for the child-that is, his parents' narcissistic cathexis. He could sense he was needed and this, he felt, g..	insecure-parent psychoanalytic narcissism	Alison Bechdel
0e6555f	There was a certain thing I did not get from my mother. There is a lack, a gap, a void. "How's that?" But in it's place, she has given me something else. Something, I would argue, that is far more valuable. "I think I can get up now." She has given me the way out."		Alison Bechdel
7d95aa5	Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.		Alison Bechdel
df9c10e	In one way, what I saw in those mirrors was the self trapped inside the self, forever. But in another way, the self in the mirror was opening out, in an infinite unfurling. I am the one whose drive is being thwarted. And I am the one who is thwarting it.	self	Alison Bechdel
b49265c	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 evi..		Alison Bechdel
041b6a0	The idea that our unconscious possesses such sure aim excited me. I became more attuned to my own erroneously carried out actions.		Alison Bechdel
199cbd6	Alice Miller writes that the child who suppresses his own feelings in order to accomodate a parent has been, in a sense, abandoned. 'Later, when these feelings of being deserted begin to emerge in the analysis of the adult, they are accompanied by such intensity of pain and despair that it is quite clear that these people could not have survived so much pain. That would only have been possible in an empathic, attentive environment, and this..	mothers	Alison Bechdel
617996d	did that require such a leap of the imagination? Perhaps affectation can be so thoroughgoing, so authentic in its details, that it stops being pretense... and becomes, for all practical purposes, real.		Alison Bechdel
aed2b97	Maybe the mother manages to be a mirror only part of the time. In such 'tantalizing' cases, some babies learn to withdraw their own needs when the mother's are evident.	mothers mirror	Alison Bechdel
8128b6f	I guess I felt like I'd failed her [by throwing up]. She had so many demands on her...The one thing she needed from me was that I not need anything from her [Bechdel's mother].	needs mothers	Alison Bechdel
97ab231	But, Jocelyn, if I really were all those things [good, kind, talented, hard working, open to change, and adorable]... ...I would die.' I wasn't sure what I meant by this, but it suddenly struck me as the truth. 'Because you'd rather die than feel anger at your mother for not giving you what you needed?	needs mothers	Alison Bechdel
53aaba6	I put the odds on a psychic deathmatch between Attila the Hun and Virginia Woolf at fifty-fifty.	humor are-you-my-mother attila-the-hun deathmatch virginia-woolf	Alison Bechdel

20b42fe

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.

truth homosexuality shame

Alison Bechdel

4408126

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

home

Alison Bechdel

6c9569f

Then there were those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure?

Alison Bechdel

74fe1fa

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

Alison Bechdel

541cd8e

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

Alison Bechdel

22f2a8d

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.

truth narcissism

Alison Bechdel

fbdc270

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity

Alison Bechdel

1925777

In this pause, I suddenly saw something very clearly. Whatever it was I wanted from my mother was simply not there to be had. It was not her fault. And it was therefore not my fault that I was unable to elicit it.

Alison Bechdel

43f0084

What would happen if we spoke the truth?

Alison Bechdel

9595bc6

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"

literary-criticism university

Alison Bechdel

219ce92

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

homosexuality

Alison Bechdel

bc346df

Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice.

feminism theory lesbianism practice

Alison Bechdel

c3d0bda

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

bd3c2fb

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

Alison Bechdel

64901a3

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

psychological-insight

Alison Bechdel

70fb111

My homosexuality remained at that point purely theoretical, an untested hypothesis. But it was a hypothesise so thorough and so convincing I saw no reason not to share it immediately.

Alison Bechdel

a35c45a

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.

Alison Bechdel

103d327

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

queer

Alison Bechdel

5c5bedb

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

Alison Bechdel

61b6257

Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?

humor

Alison Bechdel

bd28b71

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

ee8041e

Again, the troubling gap between word and meaning. My feeble language skills could not bear the weight of such a laden experience.

Alison Bechdel

2391bf2

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.

writing

Alison Bechdel

6cfd904

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.

Alison Bechdel

e57b039

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.

sex

Alison Bechdel

669cd65

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.

unconscious therapy mothers-and-daughters

Alison Bechdel

ddb2d3b

I have never read Sylvia Plath. My mother has never read Virginia Woolf. In general, we have stayed out of one another's way like this.

Alison Bechdel

ea9fb60

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."

illusion gatsbypoor school-teacher rich

Alison Bechdel

dffe9d1

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

psychoanalysis

Alison Bechdel

8ad572c

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

Alison Bechdel

6faa058

My research was stimulating but solitary

Alison Bechdel

4ebfbdf

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."

rhetoric perspective

Alison Bechdel

6771491

Every one' of the psychoanalytic trainees she [Alice Miller] has supervised has the same history: An insecure parent who did not appear to be insecure, but who depended on the child behaving in a particular way. And an 'amazing ability' on the part of the child to perceive this and take on the assigned role. "This role secured 'love' for the child-that is, his parents' narcissistic cathexis. He could sense he was needed and this, he felt, g..

insecure-parent psychoanalytic narcissism

Alison Bechdel

0e6555f

There was a certain thing I did not get from my mother. There is a lack, a gap, a void. "How's that?" But in it's place, she has given me something else. Something, I would argue, that is far more valuable. "I think I can get up now." She has given me the way out."

Alison Bechdel

7d95aa5

Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.

Alison Bechdel

df9c10e

In one way, what I saw in those mirrors was the self trapped inside the self, forever. But in another way, the self in the mirror was opening out, in an infinite unfurling. I am the one whose drive is being thwarted. And I am the one who is thwarting it.

self

Alison Bechdel

b49265c

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 evi..

Alison Bechdel

041b6a0

The idea that our unconscious possesses such sure aim excited me. I became more attuned to my own erroneously carried out actions.

Alison Bechdel

199cbd6

Alice Miller writes that the child who suppresses his own feelings in order to accomodate a parent has been, in a sense, abandoned. 'Later, when these feelings of being deserted begin to emerge in the analysis of the adult, they are accompanied by such intensity of pain and despair that it is quite clear that these people could not have survived so much pain. That would only have been possible in an empathic, attentive environment, and this..

mothers

Alison Bechdel

617996d

did that require such a leap of the imagination? Perhaps affectation can be so thoroughgoing, so authentic in its details, that it stops being pretense... and becomes, for all practical purposes, real.

Alison Bechdel

aed2b97

Maybe the mother manages to be a mirror only part of the time. In such 'tantalizing' cases, some babies learn to withdraw their own needs when the mother's are evident.

mothers mirror

Alison Bechdel

8128b6f

I guess I felt like I'd failed her [by throwing up]. She had so many demands on her...The one thing she needed from me was that I not need anything from her [Bechdel's mother].

needs mothers

Alison Bechdel

97ab231

But, Jocelyn, if I really were all those things [good, kind, talented, hard working, open to change, and adorable]... ...I would die.' I wasn't sure what I meant by this, but it suddenly struck me as the truth. 'Because you'd rather die than feel anger at your mother for not giving you what you needed?

needs mothers

Alison Bechdel

53aaba6

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

humor are-you-my-mother attila-the-hun deathmatch virginia-woolf

Alison Bechdel