Fun Home Quotes

“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, 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, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

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

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

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

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

“Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?”
― Alison Bechdel, 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, 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, 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, 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, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

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

“I didn't know there were women who wore men's clothes and had men's haircuts. But like a traveler in a foreign country who runs into someone from home - someone they've never spoken to but know by sight - I recognized her with a surge of joy.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“It’s true that he didn’t kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. 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 steaming 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, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“Although I'm good at enumerating my father's flaws, it's hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he's dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than for mothers.”
― Alison Bechdel, 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, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“Four years after my father's death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation i would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

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

“Perhaps I'm being histrionic, trying to displace my actual grief with this imaginary trauma.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew... And in this isolation, our creativity took on an aspect of compulsion.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“My mother must have bathed me hundreds of times. But it's my father rinsing me off with the purple metal cup that I remember most clearly. The suffusion of warmth as the hot water sluiced over me...
...the sudden, unbearable cold of its absence.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

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