Caitlin Flanagan Quotes

#1. My father was a writer; I've known a lot of children of writers - daughters and sons of writers, and it can be a hard way to grow up.

Caitlin Flanagan

#2. If you're a writer, you just keep following the path - keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.

Caitlin Flanagan

#3. In many respects a teenage girl's home is more important to her than at any time since she was a small child. She also needs emotional support and protection from the most corrosive cultural forces that seek to exploit her when she is least able to resist.

Caitlin Flanagan

#4. To really love Joan Didion - to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase - you have to be female.

Caitlin Flanagan

#5. Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period.

Caitlin Flanagan

#6. Every great culture has cared a lot, one way or another, about the fate of its girls.

Caitlin Flanagan

#7. Girls are the best readers in the world. Reading is really a way of kind of escaping so deeply into yourself and pursuing your own thoughts within the construct of a story.

Caitlin Flanagan

#8. Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented.

Caitlin Flanagan

#9. Pubescent girls, it seems, are manifestly more likely to exhibit extreme and bizarre psychological symptoms than are teenage boys.

Caitlin Flanagan

#10. I miss my mother very much, and I feel closest to her when I have dinner in the oven and the children are nearby playing and I'm reading a book or doing some little project.

Caitlin Flanagan

#11. I used to teach at a private school, and the parents thought I loved their children. I did not love their children! I liked them well enough, but I was always delighted to see them go off for summer vacation.

Caitlin Flanagan

#12. At every turn, girls - even the most carefully raised and deeply loved - are surrounded by a popular culture that exhorts them to think of themselves as sexually disposable creatures.

Caitlin Flanagan

#13. It can be demonstrated from history that no society has ever survived after its family life deteriorated.

Caitlin Flanagan

#14. Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.

Caitlin Flanagan

#15. I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.

Caitlin Flanagan

#16. Becoming a woman is an act partly of nature and partly of self-invention.

Caitlin Flanagan

#17. Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel safe.

Caitlin Flanagan

#18. Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.

Caitlin Flanagan

#19. I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.

Caitlin Flanagan

#20. My mother was very involved with Cesar Chavez's work on behalf of the migrant farm workers in California.

Caitlin Flanagan