Quotes from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Alison Bechdel ·  232 pages

Rating: (94.7K votes)


“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, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


“It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.”
― Alison Bechdel, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


“It was a vicious cycle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew.”
― Alison Bechdel, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


“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, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


“I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity”
― Alison Bechdel, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic



“I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy”
― Alison Bechdel, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


“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, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


“It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.”
― Alison Bechdel, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


“What would happen if we spoke the truth?”
― Alison Bechdel, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


“If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.”
― Alison Bechdel, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic



“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, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


“Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice.”
― Alison Bechdel, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


“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, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


“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, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


“Again, the troubling gap between word and meaning. My feeble language skills could not bear the weight of such a laden experience.”
― Alison Bechdel, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic



“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, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


“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, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


“The sudden approximation of my dull, provincial life to a New Yorker cartoon was exhilarating.”
― Alison Bechdel, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


“My research was stimulating but solitary”
― Alison Bechdel, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


“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.”
― Alison Bechdel, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic



“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, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


“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.”
― Alison Bechdel, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


“Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.”
― Alison Bechdel, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


“...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, quote from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic


Video

About the author

Alison Bechdel
Born place: in The United States
Born date September 10, 1960
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“Man is but mortal; and there is a point beyond which human courage cannot extend.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from The Pickwick Papers


“You're like everyone else, Strike; you want your civil liberties when you've told the missus you're at the office and you're at a lap-dancing club, but you want twenty-four-hour surveillance on your house when someone's trying to force your bathroom window open. Can't have it both ways.”
― Robert Galbraith, quote from The Cuckoo's Calling


“Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.”
― George Eliot, quote from The Mill on the Floss


“Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost. While this is obvious, it is something that most people to a greater or lesser degree choose to ignore. They ignore it because our route to reality is not easy. First of all, we are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort. Some stop making it by the end of adolescence. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading. By the end of middle age most people have given up the effort. They feel certain that their maps are complete and their Weltanschauung is correct (indeed, even sacrosanct), and they are no longer interested in new information. It is as if they are tired. Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.”
― M. Scott Peck, quote from The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth


“She wished he’d stop touching her. Not because she didn’t like it but because she liked it far too much. It made her hunger for things that could never be hers. And if someone went hungry for too long, they started to starve. Started to hurt.”
― Nalini Singh, quote from Slave to Sensation


Interesting books

India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy
(11.3K)
India After Gandhi:...
by Ramachandra Guha
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
(75.5K)
Predictably Irration...
by Dan Ariely
City of Masks
(14.1K)
City of Masks
by Mary Hoffman
The Crystal Shard
(37.9K)
The Crystal Shard
by R.A. Salvatore
Little Altars Everywhere
(27.1K)
Little Altars Everyw...
by Rebecca Wells
Women in Love
(25.8K)
Women in Love
by D.H. Lawrence

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.