Top 30 Allison Pearson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A father is the template of a man Nature gives a girl.”

— Allison Pearson

Featured in: Father's Day Quotes

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

— Allison Pearson

3. “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.”

— Allison Pearson

4. “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?”

— Allison Pearson

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

— Allison Pearson

6. “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.”

— Allison Pearson

7. “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.”

— Allison Pearson

8. “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.”

— Allison Pearson

9. “Sweet peas were the kind of flowers fairies slept in.”

— Allison Pearson

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

— Allison Pearson

11. “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.”

— Allison Pearson

12. “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.”

— Allison Pearson

13. “Anyone suffering Downton Abbey withdrawal symptoms will find an instant tonic.”

— Allison Pearson

14. “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.”

— Allison Pearson

15. “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.”

— Allison Pearson

16. “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.”

— Allison Pearson

17. “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.”

— Allison Pearson

18. “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.”

— Allison Pearson

19. “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...”

— Allison Pearson

20. “Men worry about childcare with their wallets, women feel it in their wombs.”

— Allison Pearson

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

— Allison Pearson

22. “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.”

— Allison Pearson

23. “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.”

— Allison Pearson

24. “Not unhappy is not the same thing as happy.”

— Allison Pearson

25. “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?’”

— Allison Pearson

26. “My child was one of Nature’s Tories pitted against a mother who was one of nurture’s Lefties: it was no contest.”

— Allison Pearson

27. “The best musicians answer something in you when you don’t even know the question.”

— Allison Pearson

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

— Allison Pearson

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

— Allison Pearson

30. “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.”

— Allison Pearson

31. “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?”

— Allison Pearson

32. “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.”

— Allison Pearson

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

— Allison Pearson