Top 200 Caitlin Moran Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “I believe in music and gin and joy and talking too much and human kindness.”

— Caitlin Moran

102. “This is the happiest you’ve ever been,” I told myself in the mirror in the ornate Victorian bathroom, two hours later. I was having a little girl-to-girl chat with me – “You’ve made a friend! You’re making a friend right now! Look at your face, in the middle of friending! You are hatching an attachment!”

— Caitlin Moran

103. “I have a pretty good handle on my anxiety. I basically treat myself like a nervy horse: lots of exercise, lots of sleep, lots of interesting work to keep my mind occupied, and generally avoiding being ridden hard by strangers.”

— Caitlin Moran

104. “Most sexism is down to men being accustomed to us being the losers. That’s what the problem is. We just have bad status. Man are accustomed to us being runners-up or being disqualified entirely. For men born pre-feminism, this is what they were raised on: second-class citizen mothers; sisters who need to be married off; female schoolmates going to secretarial school, then becoming housewives. Women who disengaged. Disappeared.”

— Caitlin Moran

105. “Since I met you, I feel like I can see the operating system of the world- and it is unrequited love. That is why everyone’s doing everything. Every book, opera house, moon shot and manifesto is here because someone, somewhere, lit up silent when someone else came into the room, and then quietly burned when they didn’t notice them.”

— Caitlin Moran

106. “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

107. “He’s not a person – he’s a place you travel to. Everything changes when you’re with him. He is the mayor of good times. I remember a quote I read: “It was no man you wanted, believe me – it was a world.”

— Caitlin Moran

108. “In that instance, my body had decided that this baby was not to be and had ended it. This time, it is my mind that has decided that this baby was not to be. I don’t believe one’s decision is more valid than the other. They both know me. They are both equally capable of deciding what is right.”

— Caitlin Moran

109. “There are some women out there who are just going to look better with a mustache: that’s statistics.”

— Caitlin Moran

110. “Because I haven’t yet learned the simplest and most important thing of all: the world is difficult, and we are all breakable. So just be kind.”

— Caitlin Moran

111. “I am an enthusiast who’s been pretending to be a cynic. But I have been correctly labeled now. I am for things – not against them. I must remember this. Mainly because this is more fun. It’s exhausting being cynical. You are trying to be an immovable, angry rock in the middle of a stream. But the stream will not move. It is you that will be worn down to dull silt.”

— Caitlin Moran

112. “You actually don’t exist while you’re in your bedroom,” I say to the dog, so that she knows this important fact. “Teenage girls in bedrooms aren’t real.”

— Caitlin Moran

113. “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

114. “She doesn’t like the makeup, either. “I once nearly blinded myself with a mascara brush,” she says, looking querulously at my eyeliner. I don’t want to point out that that says far more about her than it does about me. She might as well be telling me a story of how she once confused Push for Pull on a door, then banning me from using doors again – “Lest you also be betrayed by doors.”

— Caitlin Moran

115. “At its best – and I love a nice frock – fashion is a game. But for women, it’s a compulsory game, like netball. And you can’t get out of it by faking a period. I know. I’ve tried.”

— Caitlin Moran

116. “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

117. “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.”

— Caitlin Moran

118. “A self-made man” – not of woman born but alchemized, through sheer force of will, by the man himself. This is what I want to be. I want to be a self-made woman. I want to conjure myself out of every sparkling, fast moving thing I can see. I want to be the creator of myself. I’m going to begat myself.”

— Caitlin Moran

119. “I don’t understand, then, why, in the midst of all this, pregnant women – women trying to make rational decisions about their futures and, usually, that of their families, too – should be subject to more pressure about preserving life than, say, Vladimir Putin, the World Bank, or the Catholic Church.”

— Caitlin Moran

120. “And the question is always “When are you going to have kids?” Rather than “Do you want to have kids?”

— Caitlin Moran

121. “I could have written a misery memoir and instead I tried to make it funny. I never complained.”

— Caitlin Moran

122. “Because I am still learning to walk and talk, and it is a million times easier to be cynical and wield a sword, than it is to be open-hearted and stand there, holding a balloon and a birthday cake, with the infinite potential to look foolish.”

— Caitlin Moran

123. “Anger is just fear, brought to the boil.”

— Caitlin Moran

124. “Please wait for me. Don’t have all the fun now. Don’t fill up on other people who aren’t me. Don’t ruin your appetite.”

— Caitlin Moran

125. “Choose your friends because you feel most like yourself around them, because the jokes are easy and you feel like you’re in your best outfit when you’re with them, even though you’re just in a t-shirt.”

— Caitlin Moran

126. “For me, and I suspect a lot of socially awkward people, dealing with people face-to-face seems really traumatic. Particularly if you have massive sweating issues, and particularly if on top of that you have quite smelly sweat that smells like onion soup.”

— Caitlin Moran

127. “And when you are being kissed like this, you are Christmas Day; you are the moon shot; you are field larks. My shoes were suddenly worth a million pounds, and my breath was the ethyl in champagne. When someone kisses you like this, you are the point of everything.”

— Caitlin Moran

128. “This is what happens, when it feels like the weight of the world is crushing right down on you. Your fear it’s going to change you forever. And you’re right. It is. It’s going to turn you into something that’s both beautiful, and the most indestructible thing on the planet.”

— Caitlin Moran

129. “And do not think you shouldn’t be standing on that chair, shouting, “I AM A FEMINIST!” if you are a boy. A male feminist is one of the most glorious end-products of evolution. A male feminist should ABSOLUTELY be on the chair – so we ladies may all toast you, in champagne, before coveting your body wildly. And maybe get you to change that lightbulb, while you’re up there. We cannot do it ourselves. There is a big spiderweb on the socket.”

— Caitlin Moran

130. “I don’t want him to pity me. I don’t want him to see what I look like when I do something for the first time. I don’t want anyone watching me change. I will do all my changing in private. In public I am, always, the finished thing. The right thing, for the right place. A chrysalis is hung in the dark.”

— Caitlin Moran

131. “Cynicism is, ultimately, fear. Cynicism makes contact with your skin, and a thick black carapace begins to grow – like insect armor. This armor will protect your heart, from disappointment – but it leaves you almost unable to walk. You cannot dance in this armor. Cynicism keeps you pinned to the spot, in the same posture, forever.”

— Caitlin Moran

132. “When young people are cynical, and snarky, they shoot down their own future. When you keep saying “No,” all that’s left is what other people said “Yes” to before you were born. Really, “No” is no choice at all.”

— Caitlin Moran

133. “Because I still don’t know what I really think or feel, and I’m throwing grenades and filling the air with smoke while I desperately, desperately try to get off the ground: to get elevation. Because I haven’t yet learned the simplest and most important thing of all: the world is difficult, and we are all breakable. So just be kind.”

— Caitlin Moran

134. “I wish I was Bill Murray. I hope everything I’ve read about evolution is wrong, and I eventually evolve into him. It’s one of only three plans I have.”

— Caitlin Moran

135. “It really is important you say these words out loud. “I AM A FEMINIST.” If you feel you cannot say it – not even standing on the ground – I would be alarmed. It’s probably one of the most important things a woman will ever say: the equal of “I love you,” Is it a boy or a girl?” or “No! I’ve changed my mind! I don’t want bangs!”

— Caitlin Moran

136. “How amazing to go to a gig thinking of nothing but how loud you will shout; how hard you will dance; how much you will sweat; how tightly you will hug your friends, as your favourite song plays. How amazing to react to music in the way music wants you – to become an ecstatic animal.”

— Caitlin Moran

137. “I think it’s a delightful thing, for a young teenage girl to befriend someone of another generation. She is like a window into the past, I think to myself.”

— Caitlin Moran

138. “There’s a lot of Sherlock love in here. In many ways, this book might as well be called ‘Deduce THIS, Sexlock Holmes!’ with a picture of me licking his meerschaum, cross-eyed and screaming.”

— Caitlin Moran

139. “Why can’t we just loosen our belts, take off our heels, and cheerfully rot, like the boys?”

— Caitlin Moran

140. “Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside jigsaws.”

— Caitlin Moran

141. “When you live in a small house with five younger siblings, it’s actually far more sensible- and much quicker- to cry alone.”

— Caitlin Moran

142. “Because this injunction for all women to have children isn’t in any way logical. If you take a moment to consider the state of the world, the thing you notice is that there are plenty of babies being born; the planet really doesn’t need all of us to produce more babies.”

— Caitlin Moran

143. “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

144. “If you can find a frock you look nice in and can run up three flights of stairs, you’re not fat.”

— Caitlin Moran

145. “We need a temporary cessation in people having any opinions about any women, ever. I propose a, say, five-year moratorium on having opinions about women, in order to let one generation of girls get from one side of puberty to the other without growing up in a climate where women are constantly being scolded, chivvied, harassed, or subjected to thunderous opinion columns concluding that, yet again, some woman in the public eye has overreached herself and should wind her neck in.”

— Caitlin Moran

146. “Anger is just fear, brought to the boil. And the thing about scared people is, whenever you ask them for advice, on whatever subject, they only ever have one thing to say to you: “Run.”

— Caitlin Moran

147. “People with no upper-body strength, who read poetry. These are my people.”

— Caitlin Moran

148. “There’s no self-expression or joy in these joints – no springboard to self-discovery, or adventure, like any decent night out involving men, women, alcohol, and taking your clothes off. Why do many people have a gut reaction to strip clubs? Because inside them, no one is having fun.”

— Caitlin Moran

149. “As I’ve not been kissed before, I’m not really sure how you activate this function on a man.”

— Caitlin Moran

150. “For as I sit there, in pain, I suddenly notice I have changed. I am not self-loathing anymore. These billion cheap blackbirds inside me – beaking the wires of the cage, frantic – are now on the ground, sleeping. This billion eyed mess, which I cannot comprehend, contain or name, has now disappeared – replaced by these hot, red lines on my leg and arm.”

— Caitlin Moran