Caryl Churchill Quotes

I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.

Peer pressure plays a huge role in people's desire to get married.

I was fed up with being just plain Jane.

I'm a nice middle-class girl.

I just got so fed up with the bad vibes. I didn't care if it was the Beatles; I was getting out.

Consciously or unconsciously most of us adhere to what is expected of our role because we realize our social success depends on this. Some may refuse to play this game, but in the end they are marginalized and forced to play the outsider role, with limited options and decreasing freedom as they get older.

If I try and be something I am not, if I try and be cool, and I am not, I am a boring white man in a suit. Usually a pin-striped suit.

I was a victim of the American Dream, the bourgeois, middle-class dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.

I just feel like in society and in public, we have this unspoken expectation that we're all trying to meet. And there's so much pressure to try to fit in.

I wish I had some strapping football player husband. It would be such a dream to be 'normal' like that, but I'm just not.

My mother's mantra was, 'How would it look to the neighbors?' And so you don't do anything because you're worried about how it would look to the neighbors.

I'm fed up of doing run-of-the-mill stuff.

Mum wasn't scared of dad but I'm sure she got fed up with him taking her for granted... When I look back it was an empty relationship but I doubt there was ever a question of them splitting up. It wasn't the done thing.

There's a certain amount of absurdity to the idea that having extremely crisp clothes is what's going to get you through the door. And there's a certain sad reality to it, too.

I so desperately wanted to fit in. There was a trajectory, and obviously, our society tells us that you go to high school, you graduate, and then you go to college, and from there, you get an internship, you get a job, and some people study abroad, and there are so many things you see that you desperately want to be a part of.

Everyone has days where they don't get their way, where you have to go to bed early or you have too much homework to do or you can't eat the candy that you want or you miss your favorite TV show and, in those moments, you just want to tear the whole world down.

The problem is that people have an idea of what a footballer should look like, how they should behave, what they should talk about. If you act a little differently you become a target. There is pressure to conform. This is very dangerous.

The voice of authority speaks not for the one but for the many; authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think.

Too often athletes think there's these norms that I have to fit into and there are people that I have to please.

Southern women, especially upper-middle-class women, care deeply about appearances and what other people think.

We all have to wear social masks in our daily lives to get by.

It's very claustrophobic to live a life which is not really how you wanted to live. You are forcing yourself to be quiet and behave like someone you are not.

Behind the driven person is just an enormous amount of misery. You have to be miserable with the status quo to want to change it.

I was surrounded by a lot of people not doing what they wanted to do.

This world is always fed up with politicians.