Quotes from Caitlin Flanagan

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's only one thing we know about death: It comes for all of us, the famous and the obscure, and after it does, we pretty quickly disappear from memory.

words from a Davison Jeffers poem taped up on the refrigerator door. Here they are: There is no reason for amazement; surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death.

Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented.

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