Caitlin Flanagan Quotes
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.
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.
It can be demonstrated from history that no society has ever survived after its family life deteriorated.
Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.
Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period.
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.
Pubescent girls, it seems, are manifestly more likely to exhibit extreme and bizarre psychological symptoms than are teenage boys.
Every great culture has cared a lot, one way or another, about the fate of its girls.
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.
My mother was very involved with Cesar Chavez's work on behalf of the migrant farm workers in California.
I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.
If you're a writer, you just keep following the path - keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.
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.
Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.
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.