Caitlin Flanagan Quotes

Please don't judge me too much until you are older and know more things. (Spoken from mother to daughter)

Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.

My mother and I definitely got to a point where we had to have a real conversation and talk woman to woman, or daughter to mother, friend to friend - just off the record, clear the air and communicate. I didn't want to drive my mama crazy, but at the same time, I had to do, I had to learn, I had to grow and she understood that. She knows me better than anyone else on the planet so I tried to think about that.

My daughter teases me once in a while saying, Remember when you used to be my mother and you had black hair?

I've met people who are baffled by children, as though they were never children themselves.

It absolutely helped - to write the father in both 'Juicy' and 'Beasts,' I had to see the whole story from his point of view. All of a sudden I understood more of what my own father must be going through - the fear, the frustration, the anger... the hope that he'll leave a legacy.

I want to be a mom who listens.

Sometimes with my children, I remember exactly how I felt as the child in this situation, not just how it feels to be me.

Our kids now face pressures that didn’t exist when I was growing up…. As parents, it’s very hard to help our children because their experiences are so different to anything we had.

While all old people have been young, no young people have been old, and this troubling fact engenders the frustration of all parents and elders, which is that while you can describe your experience, you cannot confer it.

Before I was a mother, when I played characters that were mothers, I used my imagination, of course.

In the past, I have been guilty of returning from work with some parenting words of wisdom, ignoring the fact that my wife has been dealing with the situation for a while. The correct strategy at these times is to wind my mansplaining neck in.

Sometimes I act younger than my daughters. But that's when they say, 'Mama, stop it!'

Probably the only thing that I really don't like about being an old guy is so many of the people who understand what we know are gone.

When you're frustrated with people, when they've made you angry, it just may be because you haven't given them enough time.

Too pissed off to cry, I said, 'This is only making me hate her. I don't want to hate her. And what's the point, if that's all it's making me do?' Still refusing to answer how and why questions. Still insisting on an aura of mystery. I leaned forward, head between by knees, and the Colonel placed a head on my upper back. 'The point is that there are always alsweres, Pudge.' And then he pushed air out between his pursed lips and I could hear the angry quiver in his voice as he repeated, 'There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough.' ~Miles/Pudge and Chip/the Colonel, pg 168

I read [The Women's Room] in my 20s, and I was like, "I understand this now." And now I've become a mom and read it again and truly understand on a different level what one of the main characters goes through as a mother.

This is a nice metaphor, too, about mothers and daughters - that when it came time for me to make my own, I was making a completely different garden than the one that my mom has. They don't look like they came from relatives. Hers is a very productive and pragmatic vegetable garden, and mine is a ridiculous overabundance of useless plants. It doesn't feed anybody, it doesn't serve any purpose.

Acceptance, tolerance, bravery, compassion. These are the things my mom taught me!

Parents cannot expect advice to have the same force upon their children as experience has upon themselves.

If I should have a daughter, instead of "Mom," she's going to call me "Point B."

Without memory there can be no insight. Without love, there can be no appreciation.

I'm thinking about anything and everything. I'm making stuff up in my head, I'm using sense memory. Sometimes when it doesn't come and you've got no choice because you're getting paid to do it, you grasp at straws. It's always easy now with my kids. I just create some "what-ifs" in my head, something horrible that would devastate me as a mother.

Literature gives us a memory of lives we did not lead.

I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to 'know' as to 'feel'.