Caitlin Moran Quotes

Why would I do that? Why would I put all this effort into pretending to be ... less than I am.

In 2010, Iceland - with a lesbian prime minister and a parliament that is 50 percent female - became the first country in the world to outlaw strip clubs for feminist, rather than religious, reasons. I

Benedict Cumberbatch is very beautiful.

Come on, fellow breastkateers - we

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

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

If I'm going to spunk £500 on a pair of designer shoes, it's going to be a pair that I can a) dance to Bad Romance in and b) will allow me to run away from a murderer, should one suddenly decide to give chase. That's the minimum I ask from my footwear. To be able to dance in it, and for it not to get me murdered.

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life-raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen instead

At 19, I read a sentence that re-terraformed my head: "The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang."

In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing - not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over.

Each baby, then, is a unique collision - a cocktail, a remix - of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra's breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms.

When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes - we have never been before and we will never be again. Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely face of our existences. The honour of being alive. They will never be able to make you again. Don't you dare waste a second of it thinking something better will happen when it ends. Don't you dare

I have no idea what cunnilingus is – certainly no one I've met in Wolverhampton can afford it.

In the U.K., we have a paper called 'The Daily Mail,' which is quite misogynist. And every day, it just writes pieces about: 'Women, you're going to die now! Women, here's shoes that give you cancer! Women, just hate yourselves!'

For all that people have tried to abuse it and disown it. "feminism" is still the word we need. No other word will do. And let's face it, there has been no other word, save "Girl Power"
which makes you sound like you're into some branch of Scientology owned by Geri Halliwell. That "Girl Power" has been the sole rival to the word "feminism" in the last 50 years is a cause for much sorrow on behalf of the women. After all, P. Diddy has had four different names, and he's just one man.

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.

For preference, I would like you to stand on a chair and shout "I AM A FEMINIST!" - but this is simply because I believe everything is more exciting if you stand on a chair to do

You can be socially accepted and tell the truth about what it is to be a woman.

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.

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.

Feminism, as it stands, well ... stands. It has ground to a halt.

Like books before them, each of these songs, I know, could in the end prove to be the thing I need: a way out. A place to go.

Whenever you need to win a situation - talk about jazz, Johanna. It confuses people.

I'm not going to be worshipped by some powerful, loaded, sword-wielding man who will change my life if I marry him. Because that is Aragon, son of Arathorn, and he doesn't exist.

But now I've discovered the truth of the matter: that any woman can get laid, any time that she wants. Any woman. Any time. It is the greatest and most amazing secret on earth. It really doesn't matter if you're some fat chick wearing a top hat and speaking with a Wolverhampton accent. It's ridiculously easy.

I've learnt that you tend most to make a div of yourself when you're trying to cover up the fact that you don't know what you're doing. And that simply saying 'I don't know what I'm doing' is a massive relief.

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.

I'm learning a whole new thing: that sometimes, love isn't observable or noisy or tangible. That sometimes, love is anonymous. Sometimes, love is silent. Sometimes, love just stands there when you're calling it a cunt, biting its tongue and waiting.

When Simone de Beauvoir said, "One is not born a woman - one becomes one," she didn't know the half of it. In

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

turn our unsaid things into our life's work.

I have discovered something amazing: some people aren't just people, but a place - a whole world. Sometimes you find someone you could live in for the rest of your life. John Kite is like Narnia to me - I've pushed through his fur coat and into a land where I am Princess Duchess, High Chatter of Cair Paravel. In John Kite, people walk down the street holding pigs, and we walk onstage holding hands into the bright light, and I fly over tiny maps to great theories, and I sleep in the bathtub, still talking. I wish to be a citizen of John Kite forever - I want to move there immediately. I know he is the most amazing person in the world. Things happen with John Kite.

The only plan I've come up with is writing. I can write, because writing - unlike choreography, architecture, or conquering kingdoms - is a thing you can do when you're lonely and poor, and have no infrastructure, i.e., a ballet troupe or some cannons. Poor people can write. It's one of the few things poverty, and lack of connections, cannot stop you doing.

A book is a beautiful, paper mausoleum, or tomb, in which to store ideas...to keep the bones of your thoughts in one place, for all time. I just want to say..."Hello. We can hear you. The words survived.

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

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.

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

The thing is, one in three women in the Western world will end up having an abortion, but they never talk about it. When you keep silent about that stuff, it is because you are embarrassed by the societal distaste of the topic.

Caz doesn't like 'nearness'. It makes her extremely irascible. In a three-bedroom council house with seven people in it, she is almost perpetually furious.

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.

For throughout history, you can read the stories of women who - against all the odds - got being a woman right, but ended up being compromised, unhappy, hobbled or ruined, because all around them, society was still wrong. 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.

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.

She is also my only friend - apart from Emily Pagett, who reminds me of Baba in The Country Girls (Edna O'Brien, Hutchinson, 1962), in that she often spreads lies about me - but which I tolerate, because she also tells me gossip about other people, which is fascinating. Even if it's also not true. I recognize that ultimately you have make your own amusement.

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.

It's amazing how much you can find to say when there's one big thing you're too afraid to say: 'This isn't working.

No one ever laughs when I make these kinds of jokes. When Bill Murray says shit like this, people completely lose it. I wish I was Bill Murray. I hope everything I've read about evolution is wrong, and I eventually evolve into him.

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

Women are always being asked when they're going to have children. It's a question they're asking even more often.

As Germaine Greer puts it in The Whole Woman, to become a mother without wanting it is to live like a slave, or domestic animal.

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

Because there's a silent, shrugging, stoical acceptance of all the things in the world we can never be part of: shorts, swimming pools, strappy dresses, country walks, roller-skating, ra-ra skirts, vest tops, high heels, rope climbing, sitting on a high stool, walking past building sites, flirting, being kissed, feeling confident. And ever losing weight, ever. The idea of suggesting we don't have to be fat –that things could change –is the most distant and alien prospect of all. We're fat now and we'll be fat forever and we must never, ever mention it, and that is the end of it. It's like Harry Potter's Sorting Hat. We were pulled from the hat marked 'Fat' and that is what we must now remain, until we die. Fat is our race. Our species. Our mode. As a result, there is very little of the outside world –and very little of the year –we can enjoy. Summer is sweaty under self-conscious layers. On stormy days, wind flattens skirts against thighs, and alarms both us and, we think, onlookers and passers-by. Winter is the only time we feel truly comfortable: covered head to toe in jumpers, coats, boots and hat. I develop a crush on Father Christmas. If I married him, not only would I be expected to stay fat, but I'd look thin standing next to him, in comparison. Perspective would be my friend. We all dream of moving to Norway, or Alaska, where we could wear massive padded coats all the time, and never reveal an inch of flesh. When it rains, we're happiest of all. Then we can just stay

Keith Richards is a man without regret. When I ask him if - given the chance to do it all over again - he'd start taking heroin, he doesn't pause. Oh yes. Yes. There was a lot of experience in there - you meet a lot of weird people, different takes on life that you're not going to find if you don't go there. I loved a good high. And if you stay up, you get the songs that everyone else misses, because they're asleep. There's songs zooming around everywhere. There's songs zooming through here right now, in the air.

Practically the first action of the Neanderthal - on the happy day he evolved out of the monkey egg - was to draw a picture on a cave wall of a man with an enormous willy. Or, indeed, perhaps it was the first action of a woman. After all, we're more interested in (a) cocks and (b) decorating.

But if there is to be a fifth wave of feminism, I would hope that the main thing that distinguishes it from all that came before is that women counter the awkwardness, disconnect, and bullshit of being a modern woman not by shouting at it, internalizing it, or squabbling about it - but by simply pointing at it and going "HA!" instead.

So what is the best vegetable? Well, we all know that: it's the potato. The vegetable you can't screw up. You can throw a potato into a bonfire, run away from it - and, an hour later, it's turned into a meal. Try doing that with broccoli, or a trifle, and it will laugh in your face.

But surely they will know underneath it all I'm a good and noble person, in love with the world? Surely you get a sense of that, underneath what I'm actually saying? People must be able to smell that, underneath all the harsh words, I'm someone who still wants to own a sausage dog, and cries about Nelson Mandela.

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.

You can tell whether some misogynistic societal pressure is being exerted on women by calmly enquiring, 'And are the men doing this, as well?' If they aren't, chances are you're dealing with what we strident feminists refer to as 'some total fucking bullshit'.

We'll hurl satellites out into space, in order to find new and enthralling wonders - but we could simply turn to someone next to us, and ask a question about their life, instead.

Every time that you read a book that is worth anything, the author has put everything they know into that book; so when you read that book, you eat their life. You kind of go up a level; so if you read 50 books, you've lived 50 lifetimes.
CBC interview Q with Jian Gomeshi Sept.23, 2014

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.

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.

What a fucking bore people are.

Woman in heels stands a statistical likelihood of ending her evening with her shoes in her handbag, barefoot and demanding a piggyback to the taxi stand in order to "keep her tights clean." Men are invariably the pig whose back is called for.

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.

I was holding his hand. I banked every jealous look, and became limitlessly wealthy on them.

We think of feminism as an academic subject, but it's not. If you think feminism is academic, you think there's a right or wrong.

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.

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.

I don't think there should be anything that women are embarrassed to talk about in the 21st century, because for the last 100,000 years, men have said everything that's on their minds and described everything they have done.

This is where rock happens! This is where young people come! Rock music smells of toilet and cigarettes!

I've generally got low levels of embarrassment.

Because I am fully aware of what the word "fat" means - what it really means, when you say it, or think it. It's not just a simple, descriptive word like "brunette" or "34." It's a swear word. It's a weapon. It's a sociological subspecies. It's an accusation, dismissal, and rejection.

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.

The truth is, when you are very poor, that 11 percent bites into the very bones of your existence. Eleven percent less means choosing between electricity, or food - electricity and food that is already rationed, and fretted over. Eleven percent is not very much - but, when you are very poor, it may form the bedrock of your survival.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 feel in my bones that Lady Gaga is a true strident feminist and good for my soul - but how do I square this with the fact that she's constantly walking around in her bra and pants, even at, like, airports and stuff, where even nudists wear a fleece and linen drawstring trousers?

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.

Yes, an old-fashioned feminist "consciousness-raising" still has enormous value. 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.

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.

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.

The idea of not being able to control my own fertility genuinely terrifies me. That one mistake might change your life. That everything I am, and do, could be ended by the repeal of laws our mothers fought so hard for, that women had waited for the entire span of humanity to come about.

There's no point in drinking if no one's watching.

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.

So what do you do when you build yourself up - only to realise you built yourself with the wrong things?

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

I think there are brilliant jokes to be made about abortion, and we should be able to talk about this in the way that we make jokes about death - you should be able to make jokes about everything.

When I hear women talking about how their wedding is going to be/was the best day of their life, I can't help but think, You just haven't taken enough MDMA in a field at 3 a.m., love.

I will work out exactly how - with my no money, no money at all, until I actually receive my first, dawdling pay-cheque - I will get to Birmingham later. Perhaps Birmingham will, in the next week, move closer to Wolverhampton, and I can simply walk there!

If I don't keep this job, then my only future career-options are working in Argos, or being a prostitute,' I say, wildly.
'Maybe you could work in Argos as a prostitute,' my mother says, merrily. She appears to be enjoying this conversation. 'They could list you in the catalogue, and people could queue up, and wait for you to come down the conveyor belt.

Women wear heels because they think they make their legs look thinner.

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

Motherhood is a game you must enter with as much energy, willingness, and happiness as possible.

Women's bodies do not give up their babies so easily, and so silently, is the message. The heart will always remember.

People get really scared when women reclaim words, talk about themselves honestly and also make jokes because it's a really unstoppable combination.

Twitter means all my friends are in my computer. All my ideas are in my computer. I can do whatever I want in there; I'm kind of ... bionic.

People aren't their work. We are not our art.