Anjali: Oh, wow. I am tripping out that I actually get to work here! Being constantly surrounded by books! Bringing ideas, poems, and manifestoes to the world! How can you stand it?!
Jezanna: That reminds me, Lois. The lube shipment just came in.
--
#252, "The Trouble with Sidney" (1996), collected in Hot, Throbbing DTWOF (1997)Alison Bechdel
» Alison Bechdel - all quotes »
There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.
Michel Foucault
...good American poets are surprisingly individual and independent; they have little of the member-of-the-Academy, official man-of-letters feel that English or continental poets often have. When American poets join literary political parties, doctrinaire groups with immutable principles, whose poems themselves are manifestoes, the poets are ruined by it. We see this in the beatniks, with their official theory that you write a poem by putting down anything that happens to come into your head; this iron spontaneity of theirs makes it impossible for even a talented beatnik to write a good poem except by accident, since it eliminates the selection, exclusion, and concentration that are an essential part of writing a poem. Besides, their poems are as direct as true works of art are indirect: ironically, these conscious social manifestoes of theirs, these bohemian public speeches, make it impossible for the artist’s unconscious to operate as it normally does in the process of producing a work of art.
Randall Jarrell
Lois: Good coffee, huh?
Emma: Lois, I think you're a very attractive woman and I'd like to sleep with you.
Lois: [chokes] Gak! Ahem! You don't - coff - fool around, do you?
Emma: No, but I'd like to.Alison Bechdel
Lois: Oh, you guys have enough to worry about with your careers and all. You don't need to hear about my problems.
Ginger: Are you kidding? I'd much rather hear about your problems than work on my dissertation.
Lois: Thank you, Ginger. Considering you'd rather fellate Bill Clinton than work on your dissertation, that's very generous.Alison Bechdel
Thea: Didja make your quota, Lois?
Lois: Yup. Kissed a woman from every state in the union. Rhode Island was a drag queen, though. Do you think that counts?Alison Bechdel
Bechdel, Alison
Beilin, Yossi
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z