“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, quote from How to Build a Girl
“Self-harm - the world will come at you with knives anyway. You do not need to beat them to it.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“And, like all the best quests, in the end, I did it all for a girl: me.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“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, quote from How to Build a Girl
“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.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“For when cynicism becomes the default language, playfulness and invention become impossible. Cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas. Cynicism means your automatic answer becomes “No.” Cynicism means you presume everything will end in disappointment. And this is, ultimately, why anyone becomes cynical. Because they are scared of disappointment. Because they are scared someone will take advantage of them. Because they are fearful their innocence will be used against them—that when they run around gleefully trying to cram the whole world in their mouth, someone will try to poison them.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“Because what you are, as a teenager, is a small, silver, empty rocket. And you use loud music as fuel, and then the information in books as maps and coordinates, to tell you where you’re going.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“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, quote from How to Build a Girl
“In the end, I go where I always go when I need information on something baffling, poisonous, or terrifying: the library.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“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, quote from How to Build a Girl
“what do you do when you build yourself—only to realize you built yourself with the wrong things? You rip it up and start again. That is the work of your teenage years—to build up and tear down and build up again, over and over, endlessly, like speeded-up film of cities during boom times and wars. To be fearless, and endless, in your reinventions—to keep twisting on nineteen, going bust, and dealing in again, and again. Invent, invent, invent.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“Whenever you need to win a situation - talk about jazz, Johanna. It confuses people.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“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.
Politics will always mean more to the poor. Always. That's why we strike and march, and despair when our young say they won't vote. That's why the poor are seen as more vital, more animalistic. No classical music for us—no walking around National Trust properties or buying reclaimed flooring. We don't have nostalgia. We don't do yesterday. We can't bear it. We don't want to be reminded of our past, because it was awful: dying in means, and slums, without literacy, or the vote. Without dignity. It was all so desperate then. That's why the present and the future is for the poor—that's the place in time for us: surviving now, hoping for better later. We live now—for our instant, hot, fast treats, to pep us up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio.
You must never, never forget when you talk to someone poor, that it takes ten times the effort to get anywhere from a bad post code. It's a miracle when someone from a bad post code gets anywhere, son. A miracle they do anything at all.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“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, quote from How to Build a Girl
“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, quote from How to Build a Girl
“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, quote from How to Build a Girl
“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, quote from How to Build a Girl
“And you will be quite on your own when you do all this. There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager slowly urging you toward the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“Explaining why you love something is one of the most important jobs on earth.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“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.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“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.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“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, quote from How to Build a Girl
“So what do you do when you build yourself up - only to realise you built yourself with the wrong things?”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“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, quote from How to Build a Girl
“Here’s the amazing thing about sex: you get a whole person to yourself, for the first time since you were a baby. Someone who is looking at you—just you—and thinking about you, and wanting you, and you haven’t even had to lie at the bottom of the stairs and pretend you’re dead to get them to do it.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“hearing women singing about themselves - rather than men singing about women - makes everything seem wonderfully clear, and possible”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“People with no upper-body strength, who read poetry. These are my people.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“You go out into your world, and try and find the things that will be useful to you. Your weapons. Your tools. Your charms. You find a record, or a poem, or a picture of a girl that you pin to the wall and go, "Her. I'll try and be her. I'll try and be her - but here." You observe the way others walk, and talk, and you steal little bits of them - you collage yourself out of whatever you can get your hands on. You are like the robot Johnny 5 in Short Circuit, crying, "More input! More input for Johnny 5! as you rifle through books and watch films and sit in front of the television, trying to guess which of these things that you are watching - Alexis Carrington Colby walking down a marble staircase; Anne of Green Gables holding her shoddy suitcase; Cathy wailing on the moors; Courtney Love wailing in her petticoat; Dorothy Parker gunning people down; Grace Jones singing "Slave to the Rhythm" - you will need when you get out there. What will be useful. What will be, eventually, you?
And you will be quite on your own when you do all this. There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager slowly urging you toward the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone.
And some versions of you will end in dismal failure - many prototypes won't even get out the front door, as you suddenly realize that no, you can't style-out an all-in-one gold bodysuit and a massive attitude problem in Wolverhampton. Others will achieve temporary success - hitting new land-speed records, and amazing all around you, and then suddenly, unexpectedly exploding, like the Bluebird on Coniston Water.
But one day you'll find a version of you that will get you kissed, or befriended, or inspired, and you will make your notes accordingly, staying up all night to hone and improvise upon a tiny snatch of melody that worked.
Until - slowly, slowly - you make a viable version of you, one you can hum every day. You'll find the tiny, right piece of grit you can pearl around, until nature kicks in, and your shell will just quietly fill with magic, even while you're busy doing other things. What your nature began, nature will take over, and start completing, until you stop having to think about who you'll be entirely - as you're too busy doing, now. And ten years will pass without you even noticing.
And later, over a glass of wine - because you drink wine now, because you are grown - you will marvel over what you did. Marvel that, at the time, you kept so many secrets. Tried to keep the secret of yourself. Tried to metamorphose in the dark. The loud, drunken, fucking, eyeliner-smeared, laughing, cutting, panicking, unbearably present secret of yourself. When really you were about as secret as the moon. And as luminous, under all those clothes.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“I will never tell anyone when I feel bad again. I will never confide a weakness. It does not work. It makes things worse.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
Caitlin Moran
Born place: in Brighton, The United Kingdom
Born date April 5, 1975
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“As the banks took over the securities, the ratios between their capital and their assets lurched down towards their regulatory minima. Central banks in the United States and Europe sought to alleviate the pressure on the banks with interest rate cuts”
― Niall Ferguson, quote from The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
“Anyone who has been the victim of violence carries that violence inside himself. Anyone”
― Jan-Philipp Sendker, quote from A Well-Tempered Heart
“Do you want me to leave?' 'What? No fuckin' way do I want you to leave. What I want is for you to relax and enjoy yourself with me tonight, so all I'm doing by canceling our date is taking it our of the equation. If it happens to turn into a date later, then awesome. If it does't, then I might be a little disappointed...' He grins to let me know that he is teasing. 'There isn't any pressure here. I like you - a lot. I think that is pretty obvious. But I want you to want to be here with me in the same way as I do you. If you're not quite there yet, then that's ok. I'll wait until you are. However long it takes.”
― Samantha Towle, quote from Trouble
“However,” as Ed notes, “apart from any one Scriptural interpretation, vile, inhuman spirits do roam the earth today. And when commanded to speak, the spirits’ reply is a grave one: My name is Legion: We Are One. It is also true that these spirits possess overwhelming powers, and work with a ferocious rage, malice, and spite against mankind. Oddly, the only protection man can summon against these negative forces is mention of the name of God—though more particularly Jesus—and the presentation of blessed objects. Otherwise, nothing will stay these bizarre spirit entities.”
― quote from The Demonologist: The Extraordinary Career of Ed and Lorraine Warren
“But in the mouth of Mother Nature's fury, Ethan's totally at ease, and I wonder if it's because he's studied weather for years, or because he figured out a long time ago that the things that really hurt you don't usually fall from the sky.”
― Lara Zielin, quote from The Waiting Sky
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An Ember in the Ashe...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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