Quotes from Allison Pearson

Women now influence the majority of consumer purchases. It is women's votes that will secure victory at the next election, hence the altogether delicious spectacle of Messrs Brown and Cameron vying to tell stories about broken nights and childcare as men once boasted of goals scored or pheasants bagged.

It's not easy to reach the summit of your career by the age of 24 - and for the years after to be a humiliating scrabble downhill.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Sweet peas were the kind of flowers fairies slept in.

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.

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

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

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...

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.

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.