Quotes from Allison Pearson

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.

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.

Dying is totally out of the question.

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.

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.

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

Not unhappy is not the same thing as happy.

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

This larder of memories, of sex, of life, of family that we had built up, could always be called upon in the leaner times of our relationship... Everything we had built together over twenty years was there to be tapped into, summoned as evidence that we were made to last... I hadn't realized how much I counted on that trick working until the time came when it didn't.

One thing that did give me pause for thought, when I told my female friends now that I was writing about a 13-year-old girl, without exception they all said, 'I would not go back to being 13 for a million pounds.'

I have an American trainer - a bubbly Californian. I tell her, 'Welsh women don't run. We're congenitally incapable.' But she's got me up to five kilometers.

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.

The software program for motherhood is impossible to fully download into the male brain. You give them two tasks and they're like, 'I have to change the baby and get the dry cleaning?'

I'm not a writer just to be a writer. I want to say something that really needs expressing.

My son was about five or six months old, and he was ill, and I was sent to New York to interview three people back to back. I got home, and I saw my baby. He had been very ill, and he was on three kinds of antibiotics. I'd been away for eight days. I looked at him and thought, 'What am I doing? I'm a terrible mother and a terrible journalist.'

The best musicians answer something in you when you don't even know 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.

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

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?

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

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

In some ways, a relationship is like a savings account: during good times, you both pay in, and in the lean times there's enough to see you through. Right now, I'm heavily overdrawn.

I still remember the little boy who shouted with astonished joy when I told him I was leaving my job at EMF. Are you going to be a Real Mummy now? he asked. Had I not been a real mummy to him while I worked?

Should I text him? What is the optimum amount of time to leave before texting him back? As if love were an algorithm. Will he hate me if we don't shag on the first date? Thirty years ago, the question was, Will he think I'm a slut if I have sex with him too soon? Honestly, I'm struggling to see this as progress. The pursuit of love is exhausting and most ridiculous.