Allison Pearson > Quotes

“The great thing about unrequited love is it's the only kind that lasts.”
― Allison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It

“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.”
― Allison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It

“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.”
― Allison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It

“A father is the template of a man Nature gives a girl”
― Allison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It

“Trying to be a man is a waste of a woman.”
― Allison Pearson

“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.”
― Allison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It

“Can't is for pussies.”
― Allison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It

“Oh, where is the Fairy Godmother of explanations when you need her?”
― Allison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It

“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.”
― Allison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It

“Women used to have time to make mince pies and had to fake orgasms. Now we can manage the orgasms, but we have to fake the mince pies. And they call this progress.”
― Allison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It

“The times you don't make it are the ones children remember, not the times you do.”
― Allison Pearson

“Sweet peas were the kind of flowers fairies slept in.”
― Allison Pearson

“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.”
― Allison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It

“A mother of a one-year-old boy is a movie star in a world without critics.”
― Allison Pearson

“One of the best things about having children is that it enables you to have the same loving memories as another person - you can summon the same past. Two flashbacks but with a single image.”
― Allison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It

“. . . to serve so selflessly, you have to subdue something in yourself.”
― Allison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It

“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...”
― Allison Pearson, I Think I Love You

“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.”
― Allison Pearson, I Think I Love You

“God probably thinks it’s worth giving a sense of humor only to those of us who have to laugh at all the rubbish bits that are wrong with us.”
― Allison Pearson, I Think I Love You

“‎"There is an easy standoff between the two kinds of mother which sometimes makes it hard for us to talk to each other. I suspect that the non-working mother looks at the working mother with envy and fear because she thinks that the working mum has got away with it. And the working mum looks back with fear and envy because she knows that she has not. In order to keep going in either role, you have to convince yourself that the alternative is bad. The working mother says, because I am more fulfilled as a person I can be a better mother to my children. And sometimes, she may even believe it. The mother who stays home knows that she is giving her kids an advantage, which is something to cling to when your toddler has emptied his beaker of juice over you last clean t-shirt.”
― Allison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It

“Unfortunately, the case for equal opportunities, long established in
liberal Western society, cuts no ice in the fundamentalist regime if
the five-year old. There is no God but Mummy, and Daddy is her
prophet.”
― Alison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It

“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.”
― Allison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It

“Dying is totally out of the question.”
― Allison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It

“Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do till you require.

Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be or your affairs suppose,
But like a sad slave stay and think of nought
Save where you are, how happy you make those.”
― Allison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It

“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.”
― Allison Pearson, I Think I Love You

“She laughed now, and the sound of it--clear as a bell, dirty as a rugby match--turned heads all along their row.”
― Allison Pearson, I Think I Love You

“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.”
― Allison Pearson, I Think I Love You

“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?”
― Allison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It

“Not unhappy is not the same thing as happy.”
― Allison Pearson, How Hard Can It Be?

“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.”
― Allison Pearson