I Don't Know How She Does It (Book) Quotes

Book description: Meet Kate Reddy, hedge-fund manager and mother of two. She can juggle nine different currencies in five different time zones and get herself and two children washed and dressed and out of the house in half an hour. In Kate's life, Everything Goes Perfectly as long as Everything Goes Perfectly. She lies to her own mother about how much time she spends with her kids; practices pelvic floor squeezes in the boardroom; applies tips from Toddler Taming to soothe her irascible boss; uses her cell phone in the office bathroom to procure a hamster for her daughter's birthday ("Any working mother who says she doesn't bribe her kids can add Liar to her résumé"); and cries into the laundry hamper when she misses her children's bedtime.

I Don't Know How She Does It (Book) Quotes

Quotes from "I Don't Know How She Does It: The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother" (Book).

Author: Allison Pearson

I Don't Know How She Does It Quotes (showing 1-14 of 14)
The great thing about unrequited love is it's the only kind that lasts.

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.

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.

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.

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

Can't is for pussies.

The way I look at it, women in the City are first-generation immigrants. You get off the boat, you keep your eyes down, work as hard as you can and do your damnest to ignore the taunts of ignorant natives who hate you because you look different and you smell different and because one day you might take their job. And you hope.
You know it's probably not going to get that much better in your own lifetime, but just the fact that you occupy the space, the fact that they had to put a Tampax dispenser in the toilet - all that makes it easier for the women who come after you.... The females who come after us will scarcely give us a second thought, but they will walk on our bones.

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.

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.

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.

Dying is totally out of the question.

Unfortunately, the case for equal opportunities, long established in liberal Western society, cuts no ice in the fundamentalist regime if the five-year old. There is no God but Mummy, and Daddy is her prophet.

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

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 a sad slave stay and think of nought Save where you are, how happy you make those.

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Also read I Don't Know How She Does It (2011) movie quotes