Moranifesto Quotes

“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, Moranifesto

“And so to read is, in truth, to be in the constant act of creation. The old lady on the bus with her Orwell, the businessman on the Tube with Patricia Cornwell, the teenager roaring through Capote -- they are not engaged in idle pleasure. Their heads are on fire. Their hearts are flooding. With a book, you are the landscape, the sets, the snow, the hero, the kiss -- you are the mathematical calculation the plots the trajectory of the blazing, crashing zeppelin. You -- pale, punchable reader -- are terraforming whole worlds in your head, which will remain with you until the day you die. These books are as much a part of you as your guts and your bone. And when your guts fail and your bones break, Narnia, or Jamaica Inn, or Gormenghast will still be there; as pin-sharp and bright as the day you first imagined them -- hiding under the bedclothes, sitting on the bus. Exhausted, on a rainy day, weeping over the death of someone you never met, and who was nothing more than words until you transformed them with your time, and your love, and the imagination you constantly dismiss as "just being a bit of a bookworm.”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranifesto

“It’s amazing to me that it’s still considered a notable, commendable trait –‘Oh, she’s a well-known feminist’ –in a woman, or a girl, or a man, or a boy. That that is the unusual thing. Really, it should be the reverse. Rather than what seems like a minority having to spend time, energy, brain and heart explaining why they’re ‘into’ equality, the majority should be explaining why they’re not. You put the time into explaining why –in a world where every concept of justice, wisdom, progress and rightness is a human invention –we still prefer the human concept of ‘some people being inferior to others’ over ‘this is a vast, inky, cold, empty universe, and in it, we are the only humans that exist, all sharing a tiny milky green/ blue world, and faced with a multitude of problems, and an infinite capacity for joy, and should therefore try and stick together and accord each other some respect’.”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranifesto

“My general rule of thumb is that you´re always a little bit closer to the conditions that led to the outbreak of the Second World War than you think you are.”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranifesto

“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, Moranifesto

“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, Moranifesto

“I'm so tired of this shit. Batman never had to get together a petition with 250,000 signatures on it when he wanted to change things. He just went and rammed the Batcar into the Penguin's den. Why can't I ram a Batcar into the Penguin's den? I wish I was Batman.”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranifesto

“Pre-internet, it’s how I learned, and it learned me good. I know deep wisdoms, such as, ‘If you fancy someone hot who is already married, just wait a while – their wife might catch fire.’ (Jane Eyre)”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranifesto

“Buy flowers — or if you are poor, steal one from someone’s garden; the world owes you that much at least: a blossom — and put them at the end of the bed. When you wake, look at them, and tell yourself you are the kind of person who wakes up and sees flowers. This stops your first thought being, “I fear today. Today is the day maybe I cannot survive anymore,” which I know is what you would otherwise think. Thinking about blossoms before you think about terror is what girls must always do, in the Bad Years.”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranifesto

“We live now in a glorious age which we might term 'Post Frozen'. Frozen – the feminist Disney movie where the idiot sexy prince turns out to be a betraying motherfuck, and the whole plot revolves around, instead, the love of two sisters.”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranifesto

“If you fancy someone hot who is already married, just wait a while - their wife might catch fire. (Jane Eyre)”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranifesto

“imagine what we’ll be able to build when we really need something. When the floods start, and the graphs spike red, and we panic. When the last tiger dies, followed by the last polar bear, and the last song thrush, and we are alone – feeling the terrible melancholy, and dishonour, of being the only species left on the planet. Then – when the apocalypse arrives, finally, on our doorstep – we will galvanise, and raise forests, and refreeze the poles, and hatch and release a billion songbirds into the air, because, because – because if we can make New York, we can make anything.”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranifesto

“And if your mind tears, do not fear that, either. Depression takes a layer of skin off – so accept that you feel more of the world than most people. Did you hear what I said? YOU FEEL MORE OF THE WORLD THAN MOST PEOPLE. That’s amazing. And anxiety works like electricity in your bones – it keeps you wakeful and driven, so use those extra hours – those extra, sleepless days – that your poisoned adrenalin body is giving you. You are living longer. You live in double time. Insist that that’s a blessing. Fake that until you make that, too. 9)”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranifesto

“Cynicism is like armor—it will, initially, protect you. But you cannot grow in armor; you cannot dance in armor. Cynicism restricts our growth. Cynicism is, in the end, an act of weakness. We must always have the cojones to be optimistic. To trust people. To forgive them their mistakes if we feel like they are trying to be better people, that they are trying to learn.”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranifesto: Hilarious British Columns on Feminism, Pop Culture, and Society—A Modern Manifesto

“Your key hobbies need to be long country walks (get some fresh air in those lungs!), masturbation, and the revolution. Between those three, you should, in the long term, stay relatively sane.”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranifesto

“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, Moranifesto

“Every time your heart gets broken, breathe deep – it grows bigger as it mends. Imagine each line of red scar tissue on it with pride – the same pride you’ll one day have for stretch marks on your belly, after having a baby. Skin and hearts tear to make great things. Don’t be afraid. 8)”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranifesto

“Every atom of you, and me, once swirled around inside them. We are all stardust. We are golden. We are unique kaleidoscope rearrangements of everything that has gone before, and everything that will ever come again. The telescopes show us all there will ever be – and, also, right down inside ourselves. 4)”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranifesto

“Going blind every time you drain a boiling pan of pasta, because it steams up your glasses real bad.”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranifesto