Mariella Frostrup Quotes

I have a very childish attitude to books - a very non-analytic enthusiasm... like Alice falling down the chute.

~ Mariella Frostrup

Quite honestly, if we do manage to destroy the planet with our devil-may-care attitude to natural resources, I'd suggest we leave, as a dossier in our defence, the collected letters to agony aunts and uncles down the generations. It would certainly prove that we weren't all bad!

~ Mariella Frostrup

Romantic comedies seem to take over where the fairytales of childhood left off, feeding our dreams of a soulmate; though, sadly, the Hollywood endings prove quite elusive in the real world.

~ Mariella Frostrup

For most of us, when our 'dreams' - I use the word with reservations - came true, and marriage and motherhood became a reality, the romcoms, like horoscopes, swiftly lost their allure.

~ Mariella Frostrup

Since so many romantic comedies vary little in their storyline, the success or failure of such movies depends largely on whether we believe in the relationship of the protagonists.

~ Mariella Frostrup

I hate the thought of my children being glued to a screen. Children only play on computers all day because their parents let them.

~ Mariella Frostrup

I've been accused of riding roughshod over others' emotions, and I admit, when I feel a friend is being over-indulgent, my patience is in short supply.

~ Mariella Frostrup

For many young women, the dream of independence and a home of their own is a tantalising goal, while a lifetime devoted solely to catering for another person's needs would be hard to countenance.

~ Mariella Frostrup

I recognise my old self in a lot of the letters I get from single women who are unrealistic about what they want.

~ Mariella Frostrup

We invest less in our friendships and expect more of friends than any other relationship. We spend days working out where to book for a romantic dinner, weeks wondering how to celebrate a partner or parent's birthday, and seconds forgetting a friend's important anniversary.

~ Mariella Frostrup

There are many ways to make the most of your time on the planet, and propagation of the species is just one of them. If you're convinced that it's the key to your happiness, there are routes open to you, whether with the help of modern medical science, marrying into a readymade one, or through fostering and adoption.

~ Mariella Frostrup

When I last looked, there weren't queues of eager guys under 40 hanging outside single ladies' doors begging them to give up work and have their babies. It takes two to tango and the same number, without medical help, to make a child.

~ Mariella Frostrup

Having a baby is a disaster for your career. I don't think there's any sympathy.

~ Mariella Frostrup

Contrary to popular mythology, the best and most durable relationships are based not on vulnerability or passion but on a conjugation of positive attributes, a meeting of mind, body and soul that is all the more powerful as it is not weighed down with neediness and unreasonable expectation.

~ Mariella Frostrup

Translating any insights I have for strangers' lives into positive action in my own has proved a challenge. While I've learned a lot about what everyone else is thinking, I fail miserably to use such knowledge in my private relationships.

~ Mariella Frostrup

The sight of parents, children and grandparents all descending on a tented field to enjoy the pleasure of ideas and books renews my faith in humanity.

~ Mariella Frostrup

Sustaining true friendship is a lot more challenging than we give it credit for.

~ Mariella Frostrup

In romance, we feel the need to zoom in and expound on our partner's foibles in intimate detail; in friendship, we tend to do the opposite, avoiding confrontation through fear, lethargy or both.

~ Mariella Frostrup

Like cars, every relationship requires a bit of an occasional service, and fine-tuning should be compulsory.

~ Mariella Frostrup

While the male eye zooms in on a particular element to the exclusion of all else, a woman's gaze flickers from one tedious task to the next, to the point where we can't distinguish between the importance of mopping the kitchen floor and achieving world peace.

~ Mariella Frostrup

Mixed messages are just part and parcel of the romantic terrain, and rather than berate yourself for any crossed wires, you'd do better to work on your future resilience.

~ Mariella Frostrup

You only need to look at Jane Austen to see how crossed wires can become a defining aspect of romantic life. Then again, if the course of true love ran more smoothly, it would have a terribly detrimental effect on our cache of love stories.

~ Mariella Frostrup

Far too many girls' and women's romantic relationships are formed around a negation of their own worth and attributes rather than a confirmation of them.

~ Mariella Frostrup

Girls have a tendency to take responsibility for romantic misinterpretations, when often it's men whose perfectly honed emotional inscrutability makes life more complicated than it should be.

~ Mariella Frostrup

I met Jason on a charity walk in 2001, and we got married on a friend's boat in Panama two years later. It was the perfect wedding for two people who'd already been married and who weren't teenagers.

~ Mariella Frostrup