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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“أيةُ هفوةٍ حزينة كانت تلك؟ فكر دروغو، ربما الأمر هكذا، إنّنا نفكر أنه تحيط بنا مخلوقات شبيهةٌ بنا، على العكس ليس ثمة سوى الجليد والأحجار التي تتكلم لغةً غريبةً، ما نكاد نرفع أيدينا، لنسلّم على صديق حتى تهوي، وتنطفئ الابتسامة على الأفواه، لأننا ننتبه إلى أننا وحيدون بشكلٍ كامل”
― Dino Buzzati, quote from The Tartar Steppe

“You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“Because you believed I was capable of behaving decently, I did.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from The Devil and Miss Prym

“Wrap your legs around me,” he said, tightening his grip on my ass. I did what he told me to do.”
― Raine Miller, quote from Naked

“The idea was flawed, of course," he said irritably. "Innately and fatally flawed. It depended on two of the human race's greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature. Both of which are all well and good in literature, but the purest fantasy outside the covers of a book. Our story should have stopped that night with the cold cocoa, the night we moved in: and they all lived happily ever after, the end. Inconveniently, however, real life demanded that we keep on living.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness

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