Top 200 Caitlin Moran Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s always sunny above the clouds. Always. Every day on earth – every day I have ever had – was secretly sunny, after all.”

— Caitlin Moran

2. “The world is difficult and we are all breakable. So just be kind.”

— Caitlin Moran

3. “Self-harm – the world will come at you with knives anyway. You do not need to beat them to it.”

— Caitlin Moran

4. “A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival.”

— Caitlin Moran

5. “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

6. “If you’re not a confident person, pretend to be one.”

— Caitlin Moran

7. “Why on earth have I, because I’m a woman, got to be nice to everyone?”

— Caitlin Moran

8. “Freely available, hardcore 21st-century pornography blasts through men’s and women’s sexual imaginations like antibiotics and kills all mystery, uncertainty, and doubt – good and bad.”

— Caitlin Moran

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “When you say you’re not a feminist, if feminism hadn’t existed, and you didn’t live in a feminist world, you wouldn’t be saying that, because you’d be too busy scrubbing out the toilets in back while cooking up your husband’s tea and dying in childbirth at the age of 34.”

— Caitlin Moran

13. “If you eat enough books, you start pooping out words.”

— Caitlin Moran

14. “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

15. “But that is all part of becoming an adult. That is the difference between girls and women. That they are finally ready to hear the secret of what makes them them. That they are strong enough – for good, or for ill – to ask someone what is, unexpectedly, the most terrifying, revelatory question, on Earth; one you have to be brave, and ready, to hear: “Why do you love me?”

— Caitlin Moran

16. “I’m so glad I spent 10 years being sad and lonely.”

— Caitlin Moran

17. “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

18. “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

19. “This is the terrible thing about learning everything from books – sometimes you don’t know how to say the words. You know the ideas, but you cannot discuss them with people with any confidence. And so you stay silent. It is the curse of the autodidact. Or “autodidiact,” as I said, on the same shameful day. Oh, that was a conversation that went so wrong.”

— Caitlin Moran

20. “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

21. “Benedict Cumberbatch is very beautiful.”

— Caitlin Moran

22. “If you do it properly, life is art, really.”

— Caitlin Moran

23. “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.”

— Caitlin Moran

24. “I will never tell anyone when I feel bad again. I will never confide a weakness. It does not work. It makes things worse. 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

25. “I hate that tabloid idea of anybody who is famous having to forfeit their privacy.”

— Caitlin Moran

26. “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

27. “We should have the lady-balls to say, “Yeah – I like the look of this world. And I’ve been here for a good while, watching. Now – here’s how I’d tweak it. Because we’re all in this together. We’re all just, you know. The Guys.”

— Caitlin Moran

28. “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

29. “Death is not a release, but an incentive. The more focused you are on your death, the more righteously you live your life.”

— Caitlin Moran

30. “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

31. “Boobs exist only to jiggle up and down on the chests of women between the ages of 14 and 32, after which they get too droopy, and then presumably fall off the face of the earth, into space; maybe to eventually become part of the giant rings of Saturn.”

— Caitlin Moran

32. “When you talk to a young teenage girl, they’re just full of self-loathing. The reason they feel self-loathing is they don’t feel normal. It is a world that has not been built for them. It’s been built for men, and that’s why they feel bad.”

— Caitlin Moran

33. “It was the Spice Girls who messed it all up. And obviously, the appropriating of the phrase “girl power”, which at that point overrode any notion of feminism, and which was a phrase that meant absolutely nothing apart from being friends with your girlfriends.”

— Caitlin Moran

34. “The kind of classic pose of a female model is to look kind of sexy and a bit annoyed.”

— Caitlin Moran

35. “Life divides into amazing enjoyable times and appalling experiences that will make future amazing anecdotes.”

— Caitlin Moran

36. “When a woman walks into a room, her outfit is the first thing she says, before she even opens her mouth. Women are judged on what they wear in a way men would find incomprehensible.”

— Caitlin Moran

37. “I wish I could give up smoking, but it does taste so delicious.”

— Caitlin Moran

38. “The problem with battling yourself is that even if you win, you lose.”

— Caitlin Moran

39. “I have read more about Oprah Winfrey’s ass 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

40. “I love puffins. They are small, round gothic birds, and their babies are called pufflings.”

— Caitlin Moran

41. “A male feminist is one of the most glorious end-products of evolution.”

— Caitlin Moran

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “I am not good at small talk. I will hide in a cupboard to avoid chitty-chat.”

— Caitlin Moran

46. “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

47. “You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone.”

— Caitlin Moran

48. “This is what happens, when it feels like the weight of the world is crushing right down on you. You fear it’s going to change you forever. And you’re right. It is. It’s going to turn you into something that is both beautiful, and the most indestructible thing on the planet. I am both touched, and amused, by how apt its name is: Hope. “I relate to you,” I say to the Hope Diamond, as I stand there, staring at it. “I get what you are saying. You are the sparkliest metaphor I have ever seen.”

— Caitlin Moran

49. “So what do you do when you build yourself up – only to realise you built yourself with the wrong things?”

— Caitlin Moran

50. “And, like all the best quests, in the end, I did it all for a girl: me.”

— Caitlin Moran