Allison Pearson

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

“...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.”

“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.”

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

“‎"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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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...”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The great thing about unrequited love is it's the only kind that lasts.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Oh, where is the Fairy Godmother of explanations when you need her?”

“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.”

“Being your slave, what should I do but tendUpon 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 thoughtWhere you may be or your affairs suppose,But like a sad slave stay and think of noughtSave where you are, how happy you make those.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Can't is for pussies.”

“Dying is totally out of the question.”

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

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

“The way I look at it, women in the City are like first-generationimmigrants. You get off the boat, you keep your eyes down, work ashard as you can and do your damnest to ignore the taunts of ignorantnatives who hate you because you look different and you smelldifferent 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 ownlifetime, but just the fact that you occupy the space, the fact thatthey had to put a Tampax dispenser in the toilet - all that makes iteasier for the women who come after you.... The females who comeafter us will scarcely give us a second thought, but they will walk onour bones.”