Allison Pearson Quotes

I don't think one moment in somebody's life is going to define them.

You realize yourself when you start reflecting - because I don't live in the past, although your past is so much a part of what you are - that you can't ignore it. But I don't look at scrapbooks.

You can figure out who you were by which movies you loved when.

I went through a few phases of finding myself: I dabbled in musical theater, chess club, dance troupe, splatter-painting, school mascot (go Wildcats), babysitter, photojournalist, drill team girl, emo kid - and not one of them defined me, but every single one will always play a part in who I am.

I mean, I kind of remember... I'm 36 now, so it's kind of hard for me to relate to what it was like when I was 25, or 24, but I do remember a period in time when that's how I defined who I was, by the music I listened to and the movies I went to.

Everything I have experienced in my life helps form who I am today, and I would not change or forget any of it.

People change with time. There are things that happened to a person in his childhood and years later they seem to him alien and strange. I am trying to decipher that child. Sometimes he is a stranger to me. When you think about when you were 14, don't you feel a certain alienation?

When I was doing 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' I was asked, 'If there was one part of your life that you could erase, what would it be?' And I was so stunned by that. I thought: 'Nothing.' I would keep all the good bits and the bad bits, because those things made me who I am.

I think I can see more clearly now - about how the pattern of past experiences has shaped who I am and the characters I have played - and I'm grateful for that.

I'm not sure if the passage of time affects our core identities so much as reveals them to us.

I immerse myself in things that meant something to me while I was growing up.

Is it possible to reproduce, later in life, the impact that books, records, and films have between the ages of fourteen and seventeen? The periods of my adult life that have been most miserable have been those in which I lost fidelity to what I discovered then.

Everything about who I am, negative and positive, is what shaped me.

With doing the movies I've done I don't think I would be half the person I am today.

I always say every single moment that has led me to this moment has made me who I am.

I never thought I could write this much and now that it's coming to an end, I feel sad that I have to stop, sort of the way you feel at the end of a really good book and you know you're going to miss the main character. But in this case, the main character is me! Myself. Joe (formerly JoDan) Bunch. —Joe Bunch

Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters our perception of the human. It is not so much that you want to return to indifferent or difficult places, but that you want to not forget.

I have had fun being who I became, so to speak.

I have not an ounce of regret. Every link is so valuable in forming the chain that is my life. Who I am today is because of those links, and I wouldn't change any of them.

It's been fascinating watching all those pictures of me with a lot more hair Jeremy, and looking very young. And we've all got things we've said, twenty, thirty years ago, indeed the whole world has changed since then.

One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go around looking for things that have made him is asking for trouble. It's like giving a character to yourself. Can't do it. Can't do it. These things are just there. Is that enough?

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.'

If I were to ask you for example right now to go back with me and define those moments in your life that shaped you as a person and you began to reexamine them, something would happen.

All of us have moments in our childhood where we come alive for the first time. And we go back to those moments and think, This is when I became myself.