From Mozambique to Chad, South Africa and Liberia, Sierra Leone to Burkina Faso, feminism is the buzzword for a generation of women determined to change the course of the future for themselves and their families. – Mariella Frostrup
As a species, we tend to be doers, forever shaping and reshaping the world to better suit our purposes. – 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
It’s a universal truth that no parent wishes to acknowledge that the fear and phobias we are in thrall to in adulthood almost invariably connect back to childhood experiences. – 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
Had Elizabeth Bennet known how wildly Darcy’s heart beat for her, ‘Pride and Prejudice’ would barely have made it into a short story. Their torturously slow-burning romance is a classic example of how men and women still struggle to communicate the most basic of emotions. – Mariella Frostrup
Choosing to mother your kids full-time may seem to some the easy choice, eschewing as it does the stresses and strains of the workplace, but one of the continuing frustrations for women is the lack of respect they get for taking on the responsibility for domestic life, whether they’re also working outside the home or not. – Mariella Frostrup
The point of the feminist movement wasn’t simply to set our underwear on fire and muscle into small spaces in the male-dominated workplace, but to create a world where the contribution of both sexes was equally valued and no one’s worth was judged on their take-home salary. – Mariella Frostrup
I can’t sleep in an isolated place without pills, earplugs, and both my children in bed with me for fear of scary, feral characters with a hankering for the wilderness. – 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
In the city, I wake bolt upright in the small hours, convinced that intruders are marauding through our apartment despite Swiss bank-style security arrangements. – Mariella Frostrup
Having lived a full and stimulating life before I had my kids, I’ve relished every minute I’ve had to spend with them and felt a degree of confidence in dealing with their trials and tribulations to date. – Mariella Frostrup
When the going gets tough, the prospect of delegating half your responsibilities to a willing volunteer, either to play a supporting role or take over the breadwinning, certainly holds allure. – Mariella Frostrup
Loneliness and rootlessness are just symptoms of an insecurity that assails us all when hitting this midlife moment. The world appears intent on blanking you out. – Mariella Frostrup
It’s so much easier to count our disadvantages than tot up the mitigating circumstances that generally outweigh the despair. – Mariella Frostrup
The more brutal it gets in the working world, the more appealing the prospect of having someone at home creating a sanctuary becomes. Increasingly couples, particularly with children, are making that tough choice, with one or other partner electing to embrace domestic duties while the other brings home the cash. – 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
With longer life spans and better health and education, many feel that giving birth to a baby a mere couple of decades after they themselves were in the cradle is a little premature. – Mariella Frostrup
As for tweeting and texting: impassioned discussions, particularly when they’re intimate, don’t work in abbreviated script messages. No relationship should begin or end in 140 characters. – Mariella Frostrup
There are two ways of approaching your time on this planet: one is to sit around waiting for something to happen that will make sense of your existence, and the other is to get out there and find purpose for yourself. – 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
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
I know we should aspire to be higher philosophical beings, contemplating the universe and becoming more refined humans, but if all we did was think, then arguably we’d never have invented the wheel. – 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
My parents split up, and a lot of things going on in the outside world made me want to immerse myself in an alternative world. – Mariella Frostrup
Writers want to talk. They can’t wait to tell you what they’ve been thinking. And because they’ve been in solitude, they’ve had some fairly decent thoughts. – Mariella Frostrup
I was raised a socialist by two very socialist parents, and I still feel very animated about socialist principles. – 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
Of course, I’d like to earn Jonathan Ross’s money, but I don’t have sleepless nights wondering when someone’s going to knock on my door with sacks of cash. – 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