Top 181 Quotes & Sayings by Caitlin Moran - Page 3

Culture is so much faster and so much more effective than anything else. If you go on a march, you march for a couple hours and it might be on the news that night, but if it happens culturally, it happens forever. Everywhere in the world, that TV show is being played. Someone is downloading it illegally. It's blowing someone else's mind. Culture marches so quickly, and it's a language we all understand.

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.

I was brought up in a kind of, you know, very hippie, liberal family. And it was just always automatically assumed that men and women were equal and indeed superior.

It's like if every single male artist dressed up as farmers. In every video they were on a farm. Whether it was Jason Derulo or Oasis, they're always on a tractor, they're always surrounded by sheep and always in boots. And all the songs are about enjoying farming, and this is all you've had for 10 years - you'd think you were going mad.

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

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.

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.

Women are feminist by default.

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 going to adopt a baby? When is George going to have another kid? It would just seem weird. We'd seem demented, yet it's totally valid for women.

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

The word spinster tells you everything that you need to know about our attitude of women who choose not to marry, yes.

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.

Whenever I see a taboo, I just think that's something we need to drag screaming out into the light and discuss. Because taboos are where our fears live, and taboos are the things that keep us tiny. Particularly for women.

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

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.

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.

All the things that are taboo are the things that are not normal, and all the things that are not normal are the things that are exclusively about physically being a woman.

Let's all go and be feminists in the pub.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

If anyone was going to write a song or, you know, or a book, or make a film about a girl like me, it was going to have to be a girl like me, and quite literally, me.

We need to reclaim the word feminism. We need to reclaim the word feminism real bad.

I've got more friends than I've ever had in my life at the age of 39 - although given that I didn't have any friends until the age of 27, it doesn't say much - because I found the internet.

It's just a horrible thing to keep saying to a woman, do you want a baby inside you? I mean, it's creepy.

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.

Just proportionately, statistically, one in three women are going to have an abortion. They're not all going to feel guilty.

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.

As a former ballerina, I can't put down Maggie Shipstead's new book, Astonish Me.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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’.

Once you've got a big feminist and political justification for talking about how you went round to Benedict Cumberbatch's house and did period all over his sofa, then there's no reason not to tell that anecdote in the middle of a dinner party.

When you've got a mother who's given birth to eight children, you know, often without any kind of medical intervention - just she gave birth to one of my brothers sort of on the bedroom floor in front of all of us -you know, you see that women are fairly capable.

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.

All art is someone trying to tell you something.

...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.

I think loads of women have this idea that their life is going to start at some point, once they've busted all these problems of being a woman, once we're thin and we're pretty and we've got all of our clothes and stuff, that's when our life will begin. And you meet people at 48 who are still thinking that, and 58.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

The problem that we have is thinking there's only one kind of feminist, and that she's politically correct and right on at all times, wears flat shoes, doesn't wear makeup, probably doesn't have sex, is very angry, wears dungarees, is a vegetarian.

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

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.

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

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.

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

To say that you have to carry to term and look after a child for the rest of your life is to say I force you, legally, to love someone. It's like saying, you know, you have to go and love another - you have to go - you know, you have to go marry someone. It's like an arranged marriage.

I can only work between the hours of 8:30 and 4:30, because that's when the kids are at school. So I get to do all my work and have all of my fun in that time, which means just sitting on a chair, typing, alternately clicking between writing a column and being on Twitter, and smoking as many cigarettes as I can before my lungs give out.

The sort of the template of being a mother is that you're endlessly giving to the point of exhaustion. You know, that's amazing if you can do that, but for that to be seen as the norm of motherhood, that women are always supposed to give until they're exhausted, you know, to always take on all these burdens - and it's why I'm so, you know, in favor of protecting all of the abortion legislation we've got, to give women the right to go, I can't do that. I can't do it. I'm too tired.

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

I think it's a really important thing for women to be able to just put their hands up and go, I can't actually do any more.

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.