Caitlin Moran famous quotes

When I talk to girls, they go, 'I'm not a feminist.' And I say: 'What? You don't want to vote? Do you want to be owned by your husband? Do you want your money from your job to go into his bank account? If you were raped, do you still want that to be a crime? Congratulations : you are a feminist.'
-- Caitlin Moran

#Girl #Jobs #Husband

But deciding not to have children is a very, very hard decision for a woman to make: the atmosphere is worryingly inconducive to saying, "I choose not to," or "it all sounds a bit vile, tbh." We call these women "selfish" The inference of the word "childless" is negative: one of lack, and loss. We think of nonmothers as rangy lone wolves--rattling around, as dangerous as teenage boys or men. We make women feel that their narrative has ground to a halt in their thirities if they don't "finish things" properly and have children.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Mother #Children #Teenage

My core belief is that if you're complaining about something for more than three minutes, two minutes ago you should have done something about it.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Two #Complaining #Three

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life-raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen instead
-- Caitlin Moran

#Space #Islands #Imagination

When a woman says, ‘I have nothing to wear!’, what she really means is, ‘There’s nothing here for who I’m supposed to be today.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Fashion #Mean #Today

Batman doesn’t want a baby in order to feel he’s ‘done everything’. He’s just saved Gotham again! If this means that Batman must be a feminist role model above, say, Nicola Horlick, then so be it.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Baby #Mean #Order

I want a Zero Tolerance policy on All The Patriarchal Bullshit.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Zero #Equal Pay #Bullshit

What is feminism? Simply the belief that women should be as free as men, however nuts, dim, deluded, badly dressed, fat, receding, lazy and smug they might be. Are you a feminist? Hahaha. Of course you are.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Men #Nuts #Feminist

Any action a woman engages in from a spirit of joy, and within a similarly safe and joyous environment, falls within the city-walls of feminism. A girl has a right to dance how she wants, when her favourite record comes on.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Girl #Wall #Fall

For throughout history, you can read the stories of women who - against all the odds - got being a woman right, but ended up being compromised, unhappy, hobbled or ruined, because all around them, society was still wrong. Show a girl a pioneering hero - Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Frida Kahlo, Cleopatra, Boudicca, Joan of Arc - and you also, more often than not, show a girl a woman who was eventually crushed.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Girl #Hero #Odds

You can always tell when a woman is with the wrong man, because she has so much to say about the fact that nothing's happening. When women find the right person, on the other hand, they just... disappear for six months, then resurface, eyes shiny, and usually about six pounds heavier.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Eye #Men #Hands

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Community #Library #Exit

What art should be about,' they will say, 'is revealing exquisite and resonant truths about the human condition.' Well, to be honest - no, it shouldn’t. I mean, it can occasionally, if it wants to; but really, how many penetrating insights to human nature do you need in one lifetime? Two? Three? Once you’ve realised that no one else has a clue what they’re doing, either, and that love can be totally pointless, any further insights into human nature just start getting depressing really.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Depressing #Art #Mean

The kind of classic pose of a female model is to look kind of sexy and a bit annoyed.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Sexy #Annoyed #Female

And every book, you find, has its own social group--friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Party #Book #Library

I have a rule for working out if the root problem of something is, in fact, sexism. And it is this: asking 'Are the boys doing it? Are the boys having to worry about this stuff? Are the boys the centre of a gigantic global debate on this subject?
-- Caitlin Moran

#Boys #Roots #Work Out

I say this in the spirit of feminist encouragement, but I think I'm pretty hot. I've got all the facial features, facing the right way, at the right end, and you can always paint over the bad bits with makeup.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Encouragement #Makeup #Thinking

It's the silliness--the profligacy, and the silliness--that's so dizzying: a seven-year-old will run downstairs, kiss you hard, and then run back upstairs again, all in less than 30 seconds. It's as urgent an item on their daily agenda as eating or singing. It's like being mugged by Cupid.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Running #Kissing #Years

If you're not a confident person, pretend to be one.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Persons

If you read all your history books, there are no women in them.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Book

If you can find a frock you look nice in and can run up three flights of stairs, you're not fat.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Running #Nice #Three

A majority of women's magazines feature women who do amazing things, but then the article focuses on how she ruined it with her shoes.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Shoes #Majority #Magazines

I hate that tabloid idea of anybody who is famous having to forfeit their privacy.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Hate #Ideas #Tabloids

I am not good at small talk. I will hide in a cupboard to avoid chitty-chat.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Cupboards #Small Talk

I don't campaign for the end of the aristocracy or the upper classes; I don't really want to destroy anything at all. I just want more plurality.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Class #Aristocracy #Campaigns

I do not... look very feminine. Diana, Princess of Wales is feminine... I am... femi-none.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Princess #Looks #Feminine

I can't think of anything I hate more than a former punk - they are the most self-righteous people in the world.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Hate #Thinking #Self

I am pathetically law-abiding.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Law #Abiding

Flyaway, problem hair is the enemy of feminism, and was probably invented by the Man to crush Susan Sontag.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Crush #Men #Hair

Feminism, as it stands, well... stands. It has ground to a halt.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Feminism #Halt #Wells

Feminism means something - legislation, cultural change - but 'Girl Power' meant nothing more than being friends with your friends.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Girl #Mean #Feminism

Benedict Cumberbatch is very beautiful.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Beautiful #Very Beautiful

As far as I'm concerned, you're a feminist by default if you're born in the Western world right now.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Feminist #World #Default

I just want Tina Fey to be my best friend. And Lena Dunham. And Oprah, too.
-- Caitlin Moran

#My Best Friend #Fey #Want

I think that instead of feminism being a political thing, it should be an act of creativity. It's more of a rock n' roll thing.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Creativity #Thinking #Rocks

I loved Riot Grrl. Not only was it a punk rock revolution, but it meant you could get dressed for a night out for less than two pounds!
-- Caitlin Moran

#Night #Rocks #Two

I'm so glad I spent 10 years being sad and lonely.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Lonely #Years #Being Sad

I've generally got low levels of embarrassment.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Levels #Embarrassment #Lows

I wrote my first book at eight, all of four pages. At 10, I did a 40-page story. At 12, I wrote two stage plays.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Book #Eight #Play

I love puffins. They are small, round gothic birds, and their babies are called pufflings.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Baby #Bird #Puffins

I like a little bit of revolution. I think it's a very good hobby for a young woman. Better than squash.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Thinking #Squash #Hobbies

I know people go on about Twitter, but it is amazing. It's whatever you want it to be, and all the women got in there before the boys.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Boys #People #Goes On

So this is why I can't agree with "don't feed the trolls." When millionaire celebrity broadcasters and entire publications start trolling, ignoring them isn't really an option anymore. They are gradually making trolling normative. We have to start feeding the trolls: feeding them with achingly polite emails and comments, reminding them of how billions of people prefer to communicate with each other, every day, in the most unregulated arena of all: courteously.
-- Caitlin Moran

#People #Feminist #Email

The problem with battling yourself is that even if you win, you lose.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Winning #Problem

I told my girls, 'Look at Rihanna: She's one of the biggest pop stars in the world. She's really famous, really powerful, really rich. Yet in every single video she can only wear panties. Poor Rhianna! We'll know when she is properly powerful and successful when we see her in a lovely cardigan.'
-- Caitlin Moran

#Girl #Stars #Powerful

You think it doesn't really matter if you screw up this time around because you can just sort it all out in paradise
-- Caitlin Moran

#Thinking #Screw Ups #Paradise

You wanted to become a doctor to help people and feel better at the end of your job, I think, watching them, as the nurse takes my hand. But I don't think you do feel better at the end of the day. You look like humans have constantly disappointed you.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Jobs #Feel Better #Thinking

It's really best not to tell people when you feel bad. Growing up is about keeping secrets, and pretending everything is fine.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Life #Growing Up #Keeping Secrets

Never feel this bad again. Never come back to this place, where only a knife will do. Live a gentle and kind life. Don't do things that make you want to hurt yourself.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Hurt #Self Harm #Knives

The word 'barren' tells you everything you need to know. The word 'spinster' tells you everything you need to know about our attitude of women who choose not to marry. ... Imagine if you saw George Clooney on the cover of a magazine every week with: 'Is George broody? Is George gonna adopt a baby? When is George gonna have another kid?' It would just seem weird. We'd seem demented, yet it's totally valid for women.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Baby #Attitude #Kids

You should write, write, write every day, and learn to edit and pare it right back so you're proud of every sentence, and each one is either being useful or beautiful, but hopefully both.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Beautiful #Writing #Feminist

All art is someone trying to tell you something.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Art #Trying #Art Is

I am fully aware of what the word 'fat' means ... It's a swear word. It's a weapon. It's a sociological subspecies. It's an accusation, dismissal, and rejection.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Mean #Rejection #Weight

I never wanted to be famous. It was amusing at first, but now I hate it. I just wanted to be respected by people I respect. And I wanted to be rich. It's best to get rich, then you can do what you want.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Hate #People #Want

Watching 'Girls' has just given me renewed courage.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Girl #Given

I don't regret not going to college. Students learn up to the age of 21, then stop. I'll always be learning - the things that really matter in life. How to sign on, how to get free food, how to be streetwise.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Regret #College #Age

Always remember that, nine times out of ten, you probably aren’t having a full-on nervous breakdown – you just need a cup of tea and a biscuit. You’d be amazed how easily and repeatedly you can confuse the two. Get a big biscuit tin.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Two #Tea #Tin

The people around you are mirrors, I think. You see yourself reflected in their eyes. If the mirror is true, and smooth, you see your true self. That’s how you learn who you are.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Eye #Thinking #Mirrors

Nowadays, to be frank, every week is a good week for freakshow television. we might start asking, Why are there so many freaks? And why do they all want to be on television?
-- Caitlin Moran

#Asking #Television #Want

Self-harm - the world will come at you with knives anyway. You do not need to beat them to it.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Self Harm #Knives #Needs

Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside jigsaws.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Heaven #Waste #Jigsaw

In my family, my fat family, none of us ever say the word 'fat.' 'Fat' is the word you hear shouted on the playground or in the street - it's never allowed over the threshold of the house. My mum won't have that filth in her house. At home together, we are safe. ... There will be no harm to our feelings here because we never acknowledge fat exists. We never refer to our size. We are the elephants in the room.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Home #Elephants #House

A male feminist is one of the most glorious end-products of evolution.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Feminist #Males #Evolution

Never love someone whom you think you need to mend – or who makes you feel like you should be mended. There are boys out there who look for shining girls; they will stand next to you and say quiet things in your ear that only you can hear and that will slowly drain the joy out of your heart. The books about vampires are true, baby. Drive a stake through their hearts and run away.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Girl #Running #Baby

Mental health is seen as a massive drag to have to write about - worthy, dull. Something you should 'have' to read / write about.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Writing #Dull #Mental Health

If I'm going to spunk £500 on a pair of designer shoes, it's going to be a pair that I can a) dance to Bad Romance in and b) will allow me to run away from a murderer, should one suddenly decide to give chase. That's the minimum I ask from my footwear. To be able to dance in it, and for it not to get me murdered.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Running #Shoes #Giving

When I hear women talking about how their wedding is going to be/was the best day of their life, I can’t help but think, You just haven’t taken enough MDMA in a field at 3 a.m., love.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Taken #Thinking #Talking

I’m going to lie this one right on the line, right here, right now: I’m pro big pants. Strident feminism NEEDS big pants. Really big. I’m currently wearing a pair that could have been used as a fire blanket to put out the Great Fire of London at any point during the first 48 hours or so. They extend from the top of my thigh to my belly button, and effectively double up as a second property that I can escape to at weekends. If I were going to run for parliament, it would be solely on a platform of ‘Get Women In Massive Grundie’s’.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Running #Lying #Weekend

You can always tell when a woman is with the wrong man, because she has so much to say about the fact that nothing's happening.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Men #Dating #Facts

When Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York in 1993, his belief in the 'Broken Windows' theory led him to implement the 'Zero Tolerance' crime policy. Crime dropped dramatically, significantly, and continued to for the next ten years. Personally, I feel the time has come for women to introduce their own Zero Tolerance policy on the Broken Windows issues in our lives - I want a Zero Tolerance policy on 'All The Patriarchal Bullshit'.
-- Caitlin Moran

#New York #Zero #Years

But as the years went on, I realised that what I really want to be, all told, is a human. Just a productive, honest, courteously treated human.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Years #Want #Honest

...there is the sheer emotional, intellectual, physical, chemical pleasure of your children. The honest truth is that the world holds no greater gratification than lying in bed with your children, putting your leg on top of them in a semi-crushing manner, while saying sternly, "You are a poo.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Crush #Children #Lying

I don't want children anyway,' Caz says. 'So I'm getting nothing out of this whatsoever. I want my entire reproductive system taken out, and replaced with spare lungs, for when I start smoking. I want that option. This is pointless.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Children #Taken #Smoking

Who doesn't have a friend who worships her lover with a passion that seems baffling to everyone that knows them? Before you met him for the first time, she'd talked him up like he was a cross between Indiana Jones, Barack Obama and The Doctor. When you finally meet him, he's a quiet little thing who looks like a baked bean in glasses, and actually says 'harumph' as spelt.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Passion #Doctors #Glasses

I’m neither ‘pro-women’ nor ‘anti-men’. I’m just ‘Thumbs up for the six billion
-- Caitlin Moran

#Men #Feminist #Six

But I am, personally, not a gambler. I wouldn’t spend £1 on the lottery, let alone take a punt on a pregnancy. The stakes are far, far too high. I can’t agree with a society that would force me to bet on how much I could love under duress.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Pregnancy #Duress #Force

But nearly every woman I know has a roughly similar story - in fact, dozens of them: stories about being obsessed with a celebrity, work colleague or someone they vaguely knew for years; living in a parallel world in their head; conjuring up endless plots and scenarios for this thing that never actually happened.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Years #Plot #Stories

The first thing to improve society is not banning abortion, but making sure that everyone who had a child is in the best position to be able to rear it.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Children #Abortion #Able

One of the great things about being a writer/journalist is that my boss loves me to go out and do features on being someone else. I did a feature on Kate Middleton, where I went to an incredible fancy state home in the countryside, put on a wedding dress and posed for engagement pictures with a fake Prince William.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Home #Fake #Boss

In the end, I want to spend my 60s writing bonkbusters like Jilly Cooper.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Writing #Want #Ends

I have read more about Oprah Winfrey’s ***** than I have about the rise of China as an economic superpower. I fear this is no exaggeration. Perhaps China is rising as an economic superpower because its women aren’t spending all their time reading about Oprah Winfrey’s ass.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Reading #Rising #Ass

There are some women out there who are just going to look better with a mustache: that's statistics.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Mustache #Looks #Statistics

I cannot understand antiabortion arguments that center on the sanctity of life. As a species, we’ve fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don’t believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain, and lifelong, grinding poverty show us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we’ve made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Pain #War #Believe

I am in love, and he's the one. Obviously I thought the one before him was the one and the one before that was the one, too. Frankly, I'm so much into the idea of being in love that anyone out of about 3 million could be the one. But no, this one now is definitely the one, the very one.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Being In Love #Ideas

The unwearable of high heels is self-evidently all around us, coming to a head at the average wedding reception, a uniformly high-heeled occasion. In our minds, we see it as a serene and elegant gathering of women in their finest, one of the big chances of the year to pretend you're at the Oscars, in your stilettos. In actuality of course, ... there are women staggering around in the unaccustomed vertical, foot-flesh spilling over tight, unkind satin.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Fashion #High Heels #Self

I come from grunge, and then Brit-pop, scenes where you boast about how little you spent on an outfit. ... Now, it seems you must find The Dress, then The Dress needs to have The Belt, and a complementary but not overly-matching bag must be found which works with not only the correct hosiery, but with something to throw over yourself if you become chilly.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Fashion #Clothes #Over You

Why on earth have I, because I'm a woman, got to be nice to everyone?
-- Caitlin Moran

#Nice #Earth #Being Nice

Life divides into amazing enjoyable times and appalling experiences that will make future amazing anecdotes.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Anecdotes #Enjoyable

The motto I have penned on my knuckles is that this is the best world we have--because it's the only world we have. It's the simplest math ever. However many terrible, rankling, peeve-inducing things may occur, there are always libraries. And rain-falling-on-sea. And the moon. And love. There is always something to look back on, with satisfaction, or forward to, with joy. There is always a moment where you boggle at the world--at yourself--at the whole, unlikely, precarious business of being alive--and then start laughing
-- Caitlin Moran

#Rain #Fall #Math

If you've been fat, you will always feel and see the world as a fat person; you know how difficult it is... It's the same coming from a working-class background... it never leaves you.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Class #World #Fats

We must recall the most important of humanity guidelines: Be polite. Being polite is possibly the greatest daily contribution everyone can make to life on Earth.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Feminist #Humanity #Important

Feminism has had exactly the same problem that "political correctness" has had: people keep using the phrase without really knowing what it means.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Mean #Knowing #People

A 'sign of weakness' for a male celebrity is being found to be unfaithful, or unkind to an employee, or having crashed their car while stoned out of their tiny minds. A 'sign of weakness' for a woman, on the other hand, can be a single, unflattering picture.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Hands #Car #Feminist

If you eat enough books, you start pooping out words.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Book #Enough