Allison Pearson Quotes

A father is the template of a man Nature gives a girl

She laughed now, and the sound of it--clear as a bell, dirty as a rugby match--turned heads all along their row.

People say that time is a great healer. Which people? What are they talking about? I think some feelings you experience in your life are written in indelible ink and the best you can hope for is that they fade a little over the years.

Trying to be a man is a waste of a woman.

My husband is old-fashioned and kind, he does the greatest Sinatra impression, and I'd never have written anything if he hadn't read all those bedtime stories and unloaded the dishwasher while I slaved over chapters.

You learned that if you're tired enough, you can sleep sitting up. That the unendurable is perfectly endurable if you just take it a minute at a time, and when the alternative is no more minutes ever ...

Men worry about childcare with their wallets, women feel it in their wombs.

. . . to serve so selflessly, you have to subdue something in yourself.

My child was one of Nature's Tories pitted against a mother who was one of nurture's Lefties: it was no contest.

There are some men who will always prefer to deal with another man, any man, rather than a woman ... I can see him struggling to place me: I'm not married to him, clearly I'm not his mother, I didn't go to school with his sister and I'm sure as hell not going to go to bed with him. So what, he must be asking himself as he chews on his pigeon, is this girl doing here? What is she for?

...Emily hit the Terrible Twos and I bought a book called Toddler Taming. It was a revelation. The advice on how to deal with small angry immature people who have no idea of limits and were constantly testing their mother applied perfectly to my boss. Instead of treating him as a superior, I began handling him as though he were a tricky small boy. Whenever he was about to do something naughty, I would do my best to distract him; if I wanted him to do something, I always made it look like it was his idea.

Dying is totally out of the question.

The thing about teen idol," Louisa is saying, "is he morphs through time. The boys' faces and names change, but the emotional need they fulfill, well, that never changes.

The way I look at it, women in the City are like first-generation
immigrants. You get off the boat, you keep your eyes down, work as
hard as you can and do your damnest to ignore the taunts of ignorant
natives who hate you because you look different and you smell
different and because one day you might take their job. And you hope.
You know it's probably not going to get that much better in your own
lifetime, but just the fact that you occupy the space, the fact that
they had to put a Tampax dispenser in the toilet - all that makes it
easier for the women who come after you.... The females who come
after us will scarcely give us a second thought, but they will walk on
our bones.

No man would ever use both hands to hold a cup of tea, unless he was one day's march from the South Pole, with one chum dead in the snow, dogs all eaten and six fingers about to drop off. And even then he would look around the empty tent to check, in case anybody thought it was girly.

When you're young your mother shields you from the world because she thinks you're too young to understand, and when she's old you shield her because she's too old to understand - or to have any more understanding inflicted upon her. The curve of life goes: want to know, know, don't want to know.

The times you don't make it are the ones children remember, not the times you do.

For men, life is a highway. For women it is a roadmap.

Can't is for pussies.

When he laughed, Roy's mouth revealed a Stonehenge of ancient teeth.

In death, we are not defined by what we did or who we were but by what we meant to others. How well we loved and were loved in return.

When you have kids, there's a tendency to put the marriage stew on the back burner and give it a quick stir now and then. But it's important to remember why you had children with this person.

Sharon had seen a penis, but it was her brother's so it didn't count. Carol was the only girl in our group who had touched a real one....Carol said the penis felt like eyelid skin. Could that be right? For weeks after she told us, I would brush a finger over the skin above my eye and I would marvel that something that was made of boy could be so silky and fine, like tissue paper.

Children are the proof we've been here ... they're where we go to when we die. They're the best thing and the most impossible thing, but there's nothing else ... Life is a riddle and they are the answer. If there's any answer, it has to be them.

Death itself is too big to take in, she already sees that; the loss comes at you instead in an infinite number of small installments that can never be paid off.

Even the moon gets to put its feet up once a month. Man in the Moon, of course. If it was a Woman in the Moon, she'd never sit down. Well, would she? I

Women run the small country called Home, millions of us do it in our spare time, and no one who doesn't run that small country really knows what it feels like in the dead of night when task lists jitter like tickertape through your seething brain.

Being a parent doesn't get any easier, ... it just gets hard in a different way.

I don't believe for a minute that women really want to be understood by men.

My mother thinks some disaster has happened if I don't return a phone call from her within twenty-four hours. It's hard to explain that the only chance to return the call will be when a disaster ISN'T happening, stormy being the prevailing climate with surprise outbreaks of calm.