Allison Pearson
I am a passionate devotee of the Howard Hawks' screwball comedies of the 1930s and the 1940s, where I think that the relations between men and women were at their civilized height in terms of banter and exchange of wit and equality.Collection: Equality
Anyone suffering Downton Abbey withdrawal symptoms will find an instant tonic.Collection: Suffering
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.Collection: Return
Working mothers' laughter comes hardest when our double life is revealed for what it is: a juggling act in which the balls can drop at any time, invariably on our own head.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Tired
Men worry about childcare with their wallets, women feel it in their wombs.Collection: Children
My mother was a stay-at-home mom until I was about 11, when she got a job - and it was like a light came on inside her. It's not wrong to be passionate about your career. When you love what you do, you bring that stimulation back to your family.Collection: Mom
My ideals told me that men and women could both go out to work and be truly equal. My children told me something more complicated, something I really didn't want to hear. Their need for me was like the need for water or light: it had a devastating simplicity to it.Collection: Children
I forget the derivation of Boxing Day, but the feeling of wanting to invite your loved ones outside one at a time and punch them in the face, does that come into it somewhere?Collection: Christmas
The best musicians answer something in you when you don't even know the question.Collection: Musician
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.Collection: Children
The quickest way to stop noticing something may be to buy it, just as the quickest way to stop appreciating a person may be to marry them.Collection: Appreciate
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.Collection: Children
I don't believe for a minute that women really want to be understood by men.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Loss
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.Collection: Girly
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.Collection: Thinking
The times you don't make it are the ones children remember, not the times you do.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Thinking
A mother of a one-year-old boy is a movie star in a world without critics.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Husband
For centuries, the question of men needing to comprehend women simply didn't arise. Men were valued according to how they measured up to the manly virtues.Collection: Men
My child was one of Nature's Tories pitted against a mother who was one of nurture's Lefties: it was no contest.Collection: Mother
Oh, where is the Fairy Godmother of explanations when you need her?Collection: Godmother
The great thing about unrequited love is it's the only kind that lasts.Collection: Unrequited Love
A father is the template of a man Nature gives a girlCollection: Girl
A father is the template of a man Nature gives a girl.Collection: Fathers Day