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Caitlin Moran

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Famous Caitlin Moran Quotes

“We are Henceforth-mongers, trying to make our Henceforth the most enticing. Because the secret of everyone who comes to London - who comes to any big city - is that they came here because they did not feel normal, back at home. The only way they will ever feel normal is if they hijack popular culture with their weirdness... and make the rest of the world suddenly wish to become as weird as them.”

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Book:How to be Famous
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“Young women do know who they are - OF COURSE THEY DO! - it's just they're told they're not allowed to be it so often, and told to suppress their feelings so continually, that they gradually lose their entire instinct for happiness and self-realization, and turn into those panicking creatures you meet at parties who dance madly when 'I Am What I Am' comes on the stereo, then spend the rest of the evening crying.”

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Author:Caitlin Moran
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“Politics will always mean more to the poor. Always. That's why we strike and march, and despair when our young say they won't vote. That's why the poor are seen as more vital, and animalistic. No classical music for us - no walking around National Trust properties or buying reclaimed flooring. We don't have nostalgia. We don't do yesterday. We can't bear it. We don't want to be reminded of our past, because it was awful: dying in mines and slums without literacy or the vote. Without dignity. It was all so desperate then. That's why the present and the future is for the poor - that's the place in time for us: surviving now, hoping for better later. We live now - for our own instant hot, fast treats, to pep us up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio.”

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Author:Caitlin Moran
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“These days, however, I am much calmer - since I realised that it’s technically impossible for a woman to argue against feminism. Without feminism, you wouldn’t be allowed to have a debate on women’s place in society. You’d be too busy giving birth on the kitchen floor - biting down on a wooden spoon, so as not to disturb the men’s card game - before going back to quick-liming the dunny. This is why those female columnists in the Daily Mail - giving daily wail against feminism - amuse me. They paid you £1,600 for that, dear, I think. And I bet it’s going in your bank account, and not your husband’s. The more women argue loudly, against feminism, the more they both prove it exists and that they enjoy its hard-won privileges.”

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Book:How to Be a Woman
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“When the subject turns to abortion, cosmetic intervention, birth, motherhood, sex, love, work, misogyny, fear, or just how you feel in your own skin, women still won’t often tell the truth to each other unless they are very, very drunk. Perhaps the endlessly reported rise in female binge-drinking is simply modern women’s attempt to communicate with each other. Or maybe it is because Sancerre is so very delicious. To be honest, I’ll take bets on either.”

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Book:How to Be a Woman
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“Supongo que, a fin de cuentas, todo depende de tu experiencia personal. Las mujeres estamos acostumbradas a que nos pasen cosas que pueden considerarse «enfermedades» (calambres, hemorragias, náuseas matutinas, hinchazón, dos tetas enormes que duelen que te cagas) pero que, en realidad, solo son consecuencias de estar vivas; de modo que, cuando nos ponemos enfermas de verdad, no nos asustamos. Nuestro cuerpo está sufriendo espasmos y expulsando cosas continuamente.”

WomenFeminismWomanEnfermedadFeminisms
Book:More Than a Woman: A Brutally Honest and Hilarious Feminist Memoir on Parenting, Marriage, and Middle-Age
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“It’s amazing to me that it’s still considered a notable, commendable trait –‘Oh, she’s a well-known feminist’ –in a woman, or a girl, or a man, or a boy. That that is the unusual thing. Really, it should be the reverse. Rather than what seems like a minority having to spend time, energy, brain and heart explaining why they’re ‘into’ equality, the majority should be explaining why they’re not. You put the time into explaining why –in a world where every concept of justice, wisdom, progress and rightness is a human invention –we still prefer the human concept of ‘some people being inferior to others’ over ‘this is a vast, inky, cold, empty universe, and in it, we are the only humans that exist, all sharing a tiny milky green/ blue world, and faced with a multitude of problems, and an infinite capacity for joy, and should therefore try and stick together and accord each other some respect’.”

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Book:Moranifesto
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“And yet, despite the multiplicity of times we've done it, it is still a funny, exultant, true thing - where for a short time you turn into something else and fly; where you stop fretting and wanting, and are simply alight with joy - and all while never venturing beyond the walls of your room. And I would put our continued success down to one simple thing. At the end of every tumbling session, one of us will turn to the other and say, "Thank you very much. That was very pleasant. Very pleasant indeed. My dear, I am much obliged to you." Because at the end of the day, that is the hottest sex tip of all: gratitude. That you've found someone who wants to do that thing, with you, and no government has yet found a way to charge you VAT on it. You can set fire to the sky, and not be charged a penny. Sometimes, it's great being a human.”

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Author:Caitlin Moran
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“In the street below, a posh-looking drunk man is reading the card of a prostitute, Blue-Tacked up by a doorbell. He’s examining it with all the forensic care I presume he puts into reading a wine list. ‘What are you looking for?’ I ask him, in my head. ‘What woman will go best with your main course of terrible, horny loneliness?’ I speculate, briefly, on how different the world would be if it were run by women. In that world, if you were a lonely, horny woman – as I am. As I always am – you’d see Blu-tacked postcards by Soho doorways that read, ‘Nice man in cardigan, 24, will talk to you about The Smiths whilst making you cheese-on-toast + come to parties with you. Apply within.”

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Book:How to Build a Girl
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“That is the work of your teenage years - to build up and tear down and build up again, over and over, endlessly... They do not tell you this when you are fourteen, because the people who would tell you - your parents - are the very ones who built the thing you're so dissatisfied with. They made you how they want you. They made you how they need you. They built you with all they know, and love - and so they can't see what you're not: all the gaps you feel leave you vulnerable. All the new possibilities ony imagined by your geenration, and nonexistent to theirs. They have done their best... but now it's up to you, small, brave future, to do your best with what you have.”

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Book:How to Build a Girl
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“As it turned out, almost every notion I had on my 13th birthday about my future turned out to be a total waste of my time. When I thought of myself as an adult, all I could imagine was someone thin, and smooth, and calm, to whom things... happened. Some kind of souped-up princess with a credit card. I didn't have any notion about self-development, or following my interests, or learning big life lessons, or, most important, finding out what I was good at and trying to earn a living from it. I presumed that these were all things that some grown-ups would come along and basically tell me what to do about at some point, and that I really shouldn't worry about them. I didn't worry about what I was going to do. What I did worry about, and thought I should work hard at, was what I should be, instead. I thought all of my efforts should be concentrated on being fabulous, rather than doing fabulous things.”

Growing Up
Author:Caitlin Moran
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“There's one big difference between the poor and the rich,' Kite says, taking a drag from his cigarette. We are in a pub, at lunch-time. John Kite is always, unless stated otherwise, smoking a fag, in a pub, at lunch-time. 'The rich aren't evil, as so many of my brothers would tell you. I've known rich people -- I have played on their yachts -- and they are not unkind, or malign, and they do not hate the poor, as many would tell you. And they are not stupid -- or at least, not any more than the poor are. Much as I find amusing the idea of a ruling class of honking toffs, unable to put their socks on without Nanny helping them, it is not true. They build banks, and broker deals, and formulate policy, all with perfect competency. 'No -- the big difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich are blithe. They believe nothing can ever really be so bad, They are born with the lovely, velvety coating of blitheness -- like lanugo, on a baby -- and it is never rubbed off by a bill that can't be paid; a child that can't be educated; a home that must be left for a hostel, when the rent becomes too much. 'Their lives are the same for generations. There is no social upheaval that will really affect them. If you're comfortably middle-class, what's the worst a government policy could do? Ever? Tax you at 90 per cent and leave your bins, unemptied, on the pavement. But you and everyone you know will continue to drink wine -- but maybe cheaper -- go on holiday -- but somewhere nearer -- and pay off your mortgage -- although maybe later. 'Consider, now, then, the poor. What's the worst a government policy can do to them? It can cancel their operation, with no recourse to private care. It can run down their school -- with no escape route to a prep. It can have you out of your house and into a B&B by the end of the year. When the middle-classes get passionate about politics, they're arguing about their treats -- their tax breaks and their investments. When the poor get passionate about politics, they're fighting for their lives. 'Politics will always mean more to the poor. Always. That's why we strike and march, and despair when our young say they won't vote. That's why the poor are seen as more vital, and animalistic. No classical music for us -- no walking around National Trust properties, or buying reclaimed flooring. We don't have nostalgia. We don't do yesterday. We can't bear it. We don't want to be reminded of our past, because it was awful; dying in mines, and slums, without literacy, or the vote. Without dignity. It was all so desperate, then. That's why the present and the future is for the poor -- that's the place in time for us: surviving now, hoping for better, later. We live now -- for our instant, hot, fast treats, to prep us up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio. 'You must never, never forget, when you talk to someone poor, that it takes ten times the effort to get anywhere from a bad postcode, It's a miracle when someone from a bad postcode gets anywhere, son. A miracle they do anything at all.”

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Book:How to Build a Girl
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“The people around you are mirrors, I think to myself. The dog is paddling in the lake, I watch her lap at the water. 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. And you might be a different person to different people, but it's all feedback that you need, in order to know yourself. But if the mirror is broken or cracked or warped, I continue, taking another drag, then the reflection is not true, and you start to believe that you are this bad reflection. When I look in Courtney's eyes, I see a crazy, overbearing woman, with unbearable good fortune, who is trying to ruin him. I pause. I love him, but he hates me, that is what I see. I will have to tell Courtney to leave. I can't live with him anymore.”

LoveRelationshipsSelf EsteemConfidenceSelf WorthBreakupUnhealthy Relationships
Book:How to Be a Woman
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“Every woman who chooses - joyfully, thoughtfully, calmly, of their own free will and desire - not to have a child does womankind a massive favour in the long term. We need more women who are allowed to prove their worth as people; rather than being assessed merely for their potential to create new people. After all, half those new people we go on to create are also women - presumably themselves to be judged, in their futures, for not making new people. And so it will go on and on...”

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Book:How to Be a Woman
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“However, what I do believe to genuinely sacred - and, indeed, more useful to the earth as a whole - is trying to ensure that there are as few unbalanced, destructive people as possible. By whatever rationale you use, ending a pregnancy 12 weeks into gestation is incalculably more moral than bringing an unwanted child into this world. It's those unhappy, unwanted children, who then grew into angry adults, who have caused the great majority of humankind's miseries. They are the ones who make states feel feral; streets dangerous; relationships violent.”

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Book:How to Be a Woman
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“I don't want to sacrifice myself for something. I don't want do DIE for something. I don't even want to walk in the rain up a hill in a skirt that's sticking to my thighs for something. I want to live for something instead- as men do. I want to have fun. The most fun ever. I want to start partying like it's 1999, nine years early. I want a rapturous quest, I want to sacrifice myself to glee, I want to make the world better in some way.”

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Author:Caitlin Moran
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“We need to reclaim the word 'feminism'. We need the word 'feminism' back real bad. When statistics come in saying that only 29% of American women would describe themselves as feminist - and only 42% of British women - I used to think, What do you think feminism IS, ladies? What part of 'liberation for women' is not for you? Is it freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man you marry? The campaign for equal pay? 'Vogue' by Madonna? Jeans? Did all that good shit GET ON YOUR NERVES? Or were you just DRUNK AT THE TIME OF THE SURVEY?”

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Book:How to Be a Woman
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“Ladies, we are at a massive disadvantage in the workplace. Your male peers are flirting with their male bosses constantly. The average workplace is like f*cking Bromancing the Stone. That’s basically what male bonding is. Flirting. They’re flirting with each other playing golf, they’re flirting with each other going to the football, they’re flirting with each other chatting at the urinals – and, sadly, flirting with each other in after-hours visits to strip clubs and pubs. They are bonding with each other over their biological similarities. If the only way you can bond with them is over your biological differences, you go for it. Feel pressurised to actually f*ck them if you do? Then don’t flirt. Find it an easy way to just crack on? Then crack on – and don’t blame other women for doing it.”

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Book:How to Be a Woman
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“I have a rule of thumb that allows me to judge, when times is pressing and one needs to make a snap judgment, whether or not some sexist bullshit is afoot. Obviously, it’s not 100% infallible but by and large it definitely points you in the right direction and it's asking this question; are the men doing it? Are the men worrying about this as well? Is this taking up the men’s time? Are the men told not to do this, as it's letting the side down? Are the men having to write bloody books about this exasperating retarded, time-wasting, bullshit? Is this making Jeremy Clarkson feel insecure? Almost always the answer is no. The boys are not being told they have to be a certain way, they are just getting on with stuff.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyPatriarchyJeremy Clarckson
Book:How to Be a Woman
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“Because the purpose of feminism isn’t to make a particular type of woman. The idea that there are inherently wrong and inherently right “types” of women is what’s screwed feminism for so long — this belief that “we” wouldn’t accept slaggy birds, dim birds, birds that bitch, birds that hire cleaners, birds that stay at home with their kids, birds that have pink Mini Metros with POWERED BY FAIRY DUST! bumper stickers, birds in burkas or birds that like to pretend, in their heads, that they’re married to Zach Braff from Scrubs and that you sometimes have sex in an ambulance while the rest of the cast watch and, latterly, clap. You know what? Feminism will have all of you. 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.”

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Book:How to Be a Woman
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“Es cierto que la situación no es tan grave como en la época victoriana, cuando las mujeres no eran más que «un vestido» con una cabeza en lo alto; pero es fácil darse cuenta del camino que nos queda por recorrer: basta con constatar que las mujeres todavía tenemos que esforzarnos para encontrar una palabra aceptable con que denominar la parte de nuestro cuerpo más fundamental y definitoria: los genitales. En 2012, a la congresista de Michigan Lisa Brown se le prohibió seguir interviniendo en el Congreso por haber pronunciado la palabra «vagina» en un debate sobre la anticoncepción. El congresista republicano Mike Callton argumentó que la palabra era tan «repugnante y asquerosa que él jamás se atrevería a pronunciarla ni delante de una mujer ni de un grupo de hombres y mujeres».”

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Book:More Than a Woman: A Brutally Honest and Hilarious Feminist Memoir on Parenting, Marriage, and Middle-Age
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“Aunque a los hombres que tienen miedo o sienten que se han quedado rezagados no se lo parezca, cada vez que una mujer tiene éxito, paradójicamente también les está poniendo las cosas más fáciles a los hombres. En última instancia, está teniendo éxito por todos nosotros. Por eso el feminismo nunca podrá «ir demasiado lejos». Las mujeres no pueden «ganar» demasiado. Porque cuando «ser mujer» y «hacer cosas de mujeres» se considere igual de empoderador que «ser hombre» y «hacer cosas de hombres», los hombres no se avergonzarán de adoptar las cosas que a nosotras nos hacen más felices. Por fin viviremos en un mundo donde no existirán las «cosas de chicas» ni las «cosas de chicos», todo estará, sencillamente, dentro de la gran caja de herramientas de los seres humanos.”

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Book:More Than a Woman: A Brutally Honest and Hilarious Feminist Memoir on Parenting, Marriage, and Middle-Age
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“Sitting in seat 14A, in the sun, I float on a full-moon, tidal joy unlike anything I've ever experienced. I am getting incredibly high on a single, astounding fact: that it's always sunny above the clouds. Always. That every day on Earth- every day I have ever had- was secretly sunny after all....I feel like I've just flown 600 miles per hour head-on into the most beautiful metaphor of my life: If you fly high enough, if you get above the clouds, it's never-ending summer.”

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Book:How to Build a Girl
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“Overeating is the addiction of choice of carers, and that's why it's come to be regarded as the lowest-ranking of all the addictions. It's a way of fucking yourself up while still remaining fully functional, because you have to. Fat people aren't indulging in the "luxury" of their addiction making them useless, chaotic, or a burden. Instead, they are slowly self-destructing in a way that doesn't inconvenience anyone. And that's why it's so often a woman's addiction of choice. All the quietly eating mums. All the KitKats in office drawers. All the unhappy moments, late at night, caught only in the fridge light.”

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Book:How to Be a Woman
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“De momento, el único plan que tengo es escribir. Sé escribir, porque escribir (a diferencia de la coreografía, la arquitectura o conquistar reinos) es algo que puedes hacer aunque seas pobre y estés solo y no tengas infraestructura (una compañía de ballet o unos cañones, por ejemplo). Los pobres pueden escribir. Es de las pocas cosas que la pobreza, y la falta de contactos, no puede impedirte hacer.cai”

Caitlin Moran
Book:How to Build a Girl
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“It was good to be gay on Top of the Pops years before it was good to be gay in Parliament, or gay in church, or gay on the rugby pitch. And it’s not just gay progress that happens in this way: 24 had a black president before America did. Jane Eyre was a feminist before Germaine Greer was born. A Trip to the Moon put humans on the Moon in 1902. This is why recent debates about the importance of the arts contain, at core, an unhappy error of judgment. In both the arts cuts—29 percent of the Arts Council’s funding has now gone—and the presumption that the new, “slimmed down” National Curriculum will “squeeze out” art, drama and music, there lies a subconscious belief that the arts are some kind of . . . social luxury: the national equivalent of buying some overpriced throw pillows and big candle from John Lewis. Policing and defense, of course, remain very much “essentials”—the fridge and duvets in our country’s putative semi-detached house. But art—painting, poetry, film, TV, music, books, magazines—is a world that runs constant and parallel to ours, where we imagine different futures—millions of them—and try them out for size. Fantasy characters can kiss, and we, as a nation, can all work out how we feel about it, without having to involve real shy teenage lesbians in awful sweaters, to the benefit of everyone’s notion of civility.”

ArtsArts And HumanitiesArts EducationArts FundingFunding For The Arts
Book:Moranthology
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“At its best fashion is a game. But for women it's a compulsory game, like net ball, and you can't get out of it by faking your period. I know I have tried. And so for a woman every outfit is a hopeful spell, cast to influence the outcome of the day. An act of trying to predict your fate, like looking at your horoscope. No wonder there are so many fashion magazines. No wonder the fashion industry is worth an estimated 900 billion dollars a year. No wonder every woman's first thought is, for nearly every event in her life, be it work, snow or birth. The semi-despairing cry of "but what will I wear?" Because when a woman says I have nothing to wear, what she really means is there is nothing here for who I am supposed to be today.”

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Book:How to Be a Woman
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