Allison Pearson

“קרם לחות פשוט מועיל לא פחות משיקויי הנעורים באריזות המפונפנות.”

“החברות בינינו עדיין הייתה חדשה מכדי להסתכן במחלוקת.”

“ילדים הם ההוכחה שהיינו פה.”

“We carry our younger selves with us our whole lives, and we can measure out of lives by music we've loved or icons we've loved.”

“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.”

“When we talk about women's struggle to balance their lives, certain men growl, 'If you can't stand the heat, get back to the kitchen.' Men who have never changed a nappy, mainly, and couldn't pick their child's teacher out in a police line-up.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Endings are not my thing.”

“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.'”

“Every so often, you come across a member of the younger generation who makes you think, 'Well, perhaps the future's going to be OK after all.'”

“My strong sense now is that, as women have become more equal in society, so their depictions onscreen have become lamer and lamer and lamer, to the point that it's an embarrassment.”

“Girls slightly younger tended to be Donny Osmond girls or Michael Jackson girls, but for my generation, it tended to be David Cassidy.”

“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.”

“It is customary for the writer to sneer that Hollywood has traduced their book. Well, I adore my film.”

“If I had written a book saying, 'Ladies, your life is terrible,' I would have sold three copies. It's always better to laugh people into recognition.”

“I don't believe for a minute that women really want to be understood by men.”