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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“We could talk..." I take a long inhale off my cigarette and gradually let it out, smoke circling my face. "If you want to."
She tenses as she shakes her head and stares out the window to the side of her. "I want to play make believe for just a little bit longer."
God, i've never felt my heart shatter for someone else more than I have at this moment.”
― Jessica Sorensen, quote from The Probability of Violet & Luke

“I like looking at your body,” she said.
“Thank you. I like looking at you, period,” I responded. She removed her shirt. She asked for help with her bra. We embraced. Our skins touched. I felt her heart beat against my chest. I felt my heart beating. Our heartbeats became one. One heartbeat. We became one. Time passed. I looked at my watch. 10:10. I stood. She remained on the bed, defining beauty.
“It’s getting close to eleven, baby. You should probably get up,” I said, looking for my shirt. I ran my hands through my hair.
“Stand right there,” she said. “Don’t move.” I stood. She reached to the side of the bed, and got her phone from her purse. She held it at arm’s length. “Don’t move,” she said.
“I heard you,” I responded. I stood. She took three photos. “I wish I could paint a picture of you,” I said.
“Do you paint?” she asked.
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― Scott Hildreth, quote from Broken People

“Do you really believe that freedom of choice exists? India still has a caste system. Most of the Middle East treats women as inferiors and those who practice other religions as enemies. China regulates how many children couples can have, genocide abounds in South America and Africa, Malaysia has a booming underage sex trade, and the list goes on and on. All around the world the people in power abuse it and human rights are ignored. But what if we were incapable of hurting our fellow man? What if our core impulse was to help each other rather than control each other?”
― Jack Kilborn, quote from Afraid

“NO. No no no. I don't want to screw you. I just love you. When did who you want to screw become the whole game? Since when is the person you want to screw the only person you get to love? It's so stupid, Tiny! I mean, Jesus, who even gives a fuck about sex?! People act like it's the most important thing humans do, but come on. How can our sentient fucking lives revolve around something slugs can do. I mean, who you want to screw and whether you screw them? Those are important questions, I guess. But they're not that important. You know what's important? Who would you die for? Who do you wake up at five forty-five in the morning for even though you don't even know why he needs you? Whose drunken nose would you pick?!”
― John Green, quote from Will ti presento Will

“When our audiences are skeptical, the more we try to dominate them, the more they resist.”
― Adam M. Grant, quote from Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success

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