32 Quotes by Caitlin Flanagan

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

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.

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

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.

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

What the altar-bound of today end up buying from their numberless vendors is a dog's breakfast of bridal excess - part society wedding of the twenties, part Long Island Italian wedding of the fifties. It's The Philadelphia Story and The Wedding Singer served up together in one curious and costly buffet.

Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented.

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

Mothers ... would do anything to steer their daughter the right way. It is frustrating beyond measure for them when a daughter screams, 'You don't understand, and you'll never understand!' The mother stamps her foot in aggravation, but in this case the daughter is right: the mother doesn't understand. She merely remembers, and memory is separate from experience.