Quotes from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“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

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“Poétise, poétise, fais-toi le grand cinéma de la liberté passée. Vrai que j'aimais ma vie, que je voyais l'avenir sans désespoir. Et je ne m'ennuyais pas. J'en ai réellement prononcé des propos désabusés sur le mariage, le soir dans ma chambre, avec les copines étudiantes, une connerie, la mort, rien qu'à voir la trombine des couples mariés au restau, ils bouffent l'un en face de l'autre sans parler, momifiés. Quand Hélène, licence de philo, concluait que c'était tout de même un mal nécessaire, pour avoir des enfants, je pensais qu'elle avait de drôles d'idées, des arguments saugrenus. Moi je n'imaginais jamais la maternité avec ou sans mariage. Je m'irritais aussi quand presque toutes se vantaient de savoir bien coudre, repasser sans faux plis, heureuses de ne pas être seulement intellectuelles, ma fierté devant une mousse au chocolat réussie avait disparu en même temps que Brigitte, la leur m'horripilait. Oui, je vivais de la même manière qu'un garçon de mon âge, étudiant qui se débrouille avec l'argent de l'État, l'aide modeste des parents, le baby-sitting et les enquêtes, va au cinéma, lit, danse, et bosse pour avoir ses examens, juge le mariage une idée bouffonne.”
― Annie Ernaux, quote from A Frozen Woman

“I want him to look in the mirror and smile, not scowl. I need him to not think of himself as a monster. I need him to see the real him, because if he doesn’t pull himself out of the villain role, it will destroy him, and I’ll just be left with ashes. I just needed to get it all out because I feel like I’m drowning, and it’s hard to keep myself above water,especially when I’m fighting against the current to save him rather than myself.”
― Anna Todd, quote from After Ever Happy

“Não é raro que um homem, a quem se intimida de um modo sem precedentes, completamente insólito e irracional, comece a duvidar das suas crenças mais banais. Por mais estranho que isso possa parecer, ele começa a desconfiar que a justiça e a razão estejam do outro lado. Assim, se há pessoas imparciais presentes, recorre-se a elas, em busca de ajuda por causa de suas ideias titubeantes.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Bartleby el escribiente

“Sometimes when your life seems most out of control, you know there's a direction. I don't mean you can't have free will--in fact, that can be the most important part.”
― quote from The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less

“I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Slottet

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