Top 200 Caitlin Moran Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 5

151. “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 only imagined by your generation, and nonexistent to theirs. They have done their best, with the technology they had to hand at the time – but now it’s up to you, small, brave future, to do your best with what you have.”

— Caitlin Moran

152. “Of course, in the end, when Mapplethorpe turned out to be very gay, Smith was left with no other option than to go off and write Horses and grow the world’s most influential lady mustache instead. Her hand was forced into productivity.”

— Caitlin Moran

153. “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...”

— Caitlin Moran

154. “I’m going to say ‘Amen’ now. This is a deal now. We are square on this. You will sort this out. Violet will not rat on us. Amen.”

— Caitlin Moran

155. “I wish I could learn that just three drinks is enough, but I have not learned that.”

— Caitlin Moran

156. “In the end, I go where I always go when I need information on something baffling, poisonous, or terrifying: the library.”

— Caitlin Moran

157. “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

158. “These days, if your child announced that they wanted to be a politician most people would react as if they had come down to the breakfast table and said, ‘Mother, Father – I’ve decided to become a massive pervert.”

— Caitlin Moran

159. “The reason they don’t ask me when they’re having kids, of course, is because men can, pretty much, carry on a normal life once they’ve had a baby.”

— Caitlin Moran

160. “The sudden noise through the headphones is disconcerting – a massive, evil-sounding slab of guitar, seemingly played with the sole intention of terrifying anyone who hasn’t yet lived through a roughly equivalent sonic experience, such as riding their tricycle under a malfunctioning cement mixer full of dying children.”

— Caitlin Moran

161. “I saw what an achievement it was – the will of a small, countable number of men and women who wrote, and thought, and marched, and sang. If you’d killed the right two hundred people, this future would never have come at all. Perhaps this future had come so late because, previously, they had killed the right two hundred people – over and over, through history.”

— Caitlin Moran

162. “All art is someone trying to tell you something.”

— Caitlin Moran

163. “Two women at the same event wearing the same outfit is a disaster. But two women at the same event singing the same song is a party. And two women at the same event talking about Doris from Fame is a friendship for life. Fill yourself with words, choruses, and heroes, like you’re supposed to fill your wardrobe with shoes, brooches, and belts.”

— Caitlin Moran

164. “I read something once that when you’re online, your inhibitions are lowered to the state where you’ve had three drinks. Once you basically know that the entire internet is slightly drunk, it all makes a lot more sense, and you deport yourself accordingly.”

— Caitlin Moran

165. “You don’t live in London. You play London – to win. That’s why we’re all here. It is a city full of contestants, each chasing one of a million possible prizes: wealth, love, fame. Inspiration.”

— Caitlin Moran

166. “As a former ballerina, I can’t put down Maggie Shipstead’s new book, Astonish Me.”

— Caitlin Moran

167. “Your mind is the projection screen every writer steals; it is the firing of your neurones that makes every book come alive. You are the electricity that turns it on. A book cannot live until the touch of your hand on the first page brings it alive. A writer is essentially typing blank pages – shouting out spells in the dark – until the words are read by you, and the magic explodes into your head, and no one else’s.”

— Caitlin Moran

168. “You can’t meet your heroes – because they are, in the end, just an idea, that lives inside you.”

— Caitlin Moran

169. “Shut up, Ed – the world below us has turned into a map. A real map! The woods look like the “Woodland: Deciduous” markings of Ordnance Survey. It is just as they drew it! Who knew! Who knew you could put the whole world on paper, after all! The artists were right! This is so reassuring!”

— Caitlin Moran

170. “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

171. “Because my biggest secret of all – the one I would rather die than tell, the one I wouldn’t even put in my diary – is that I really, truly, in my heart, want to be beautiful. I want to be beautiful so much – because it will keep me safe, and keep me lucky, and it’s too exhausting not to be.”

— Caitlin Moran

172. “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

173. “I hate stories where the conclusion is that women just have to suffer and get stronger,” Julia said. “Those are the worst stories.”

— Caitlin Moran

174. “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.”

— Caitlin Moran

175. “And there’s your pecking order of unhappiness, right there in a nutshell. Of all the overwhelming compulsions you can be ruined by, all of them have some potential for some perverted, self-destructive fascination – except eating.”

— Caitlin Moran

176. “All my life, I’ve thought that if I couldn’t say anything boys found interesting, I might as well shut up. But now I realize there was that whole other, invisible half of the world – girls – that I could speak to instead. A whole other half equally silent and frustrated, just waiting to be given the smallest starting signal – the tiniest starter culture – and they would explode into words, and song, and action, and relieved, euphoric cries of “Me too! I feel this too!”

— Caitlin Moran

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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.”

— Caitlin Moran

180. “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 percent 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.”

— Caitlin Moran

181. “I think if you thought about it a little while longer, you’d realize that you’d far better be a Ghostbuster: a nerd in New York with an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on your back, and a one-in-four chance of being Bill Murray.”

— Caitlin Moran

182. “And so I have brought this pint for him – a proper Irish pint, from Ireland. This pint – brought through the sky, and over the sea. I am finally buying my old man a good pint of Guinness. As I walk through the door, holding the glass – kids throwing themselves at me, one already crying – I hold it out to Dadda, and tell him to sip it. He tears the cling film off – looking at me, confused – and then takes a sip. “Christ. That’s flat,” he says.”

— Caitlin Moran

183. “This is Pat,” he says, introducing me to a man who is also drunk. “Because I’m Pat too! We’re two Pats! He’s a Protestant,” he adds in a stagy whisper, “but we’ve sorted it all out.”

— Caitlin Moran

184. “Our new budget now, with no wriggle room for anything extra – not a pot of jam, or a new pair of shoes. We cannot do anything other than stay very still. We are on 11 percent less of was-never-enough-in-the-first-place.”

— Caitlin Moran

185. “Watching ‘Girls’ has just given me renewed courage.”

— Caitlin Moran

186. “In the 21st century, we don’t need to march against size-zero models, risible pornography, lap-dancing clubs, and Botox. We don’t need to riot or go on hunger strikes. There’s no need to throw ourselves under a horse, or even a donkey. We just need to look it in the eye, squarely, for a minute, and then start laughing at it.”

— Caitlin Moran

187. “He was bright, bright, bright, like a lantern above a pub door in November- he made you want to come in and never leave.”

— Caitlin Moran

188. “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

189. “Musicals are strictly for homosexuals and womenfolk,” Kenny says drily, in a way that’s so post-post-post-ironic it actually stops being communication, and simply becomes confusing and unhelpful.”

— Caitlin Moran

190. “Rock music needs very supportive bras, I note, holding onto my bosoms as I leap up and down, doggedly. This is something the music press had never mentioned. They have so little guidance for girls.”

— Caitlin Moran

191. “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.”

— Caitlin Moran

192. “Now I know what happens at a gig, I will be ready for it, next time – I will come in just a T-shirt and shorts and books, and fight my way to the front, like a quietly determined soldier, and then let the band take my head off. I want to walk into rooms like that every night, with a sense of something happening.”

— Caitlin Moran

193. “In the end, I want to spend my 60s writing bonkbusters like Jilly Cooper.”

— Caitlin Moran

194. “And of course, the deepest irony about the young being cynical is that they are the ones that need to move, and dance, and trust the most.”

— Caitlin Moran

195. “I’m very into the idea of sorting things out through superior paperwork. This is my favorite transformatory power.”

— Caitlin Moran

196. “All too often, women end up marrying their glass ceilings.”

— Caitlin Moran

197. “Kriss gives me a sibling-punch. Anyone who has a sibling will know what that is – a punch that really hurts quite a lot, and that is meant to, but that you cannot take offense at, or retaliate against, because you went out of your way to get it – because sometimes you want your sibling to punch you. No one knows why this is.”

— Caitlin Moran

198. “Your hard-won triumphs can be wholly negated if you live in a climate where your victories are seen as threatening, incorrect, distasteful, or – most crucially of all, for a teenage girl – simply uncool. Few girls would choose to be right – right, down into their clever, brilliant bones – but lonely.”

— Caitlin Moran

199. “Flyaway, problem hair is the enemy of feminism, and was probably invented by the Man to crush Susan Sontag.”

— Caitlin Moran

200. “Poor people can write. It’s one of the few things poverty, and lack of connections, cannot stop you doing.”

— Caitlin Moran