Top 100 Dolly Alderton Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When I’m a single woman in London I will be extremely elegant and slim and wear black dresses and drink martinis and will only meet men at book launches and at exhibition openings.”

— Dolly Alderton

2. “No matter how uncertain and unpredictable life gets, some people really do walk next to you for ever.”

— Dolly Alderton

3. “To choose to love is to take a risk.”

— Dolly Alderton

4. “We hide those parts of ourselves, the bits that are dark or loud or eccentric or twisted, for fear of not being liked. It was those parts of ourselves, he argued, that were the most beautiful.”

— Dolly Alderton

5. “I hated lateness. Being late is a selfish habit adopted by boring people in search of a personality quirk who can’t be bothered to take up an instrument.”

— Dolly Alderton

6. “You are moving out of the realm of fantasy “when I grow up” and adjusting to the reality that you’re there; it’s happening.”

— Dolly Alderton

7. “Then I realized – he would be able to decide when he wanted to fall in love and have a family and it would happen. There would always be a woman who wanted to love him. He didn’t have to take this chance at all – he could wait for another chance. Then another one. The female population was just an endless source of chances and he could wait as long as he wanted. There was so little risk involved when it came to who and how he loved. Nothing meant anything to him.”

— Dolly Alderton

8. “You can’t ‘delete’ a human you love. I’m not a picture on your phone,” I said, sitting back in my chair and rubbing my eyes with the heels of my palms.”

— Dolly Alderton

9. “Nearly everything I know about love, I’ve learned in my long-term friendships with women. Particularly the ones I have lived with at one point or another. I know what it is to know every tiny detail about a person and revel in that knowledge as if it were an academic subject. When it comes to the girls I’ve built homes with, I’m like the woman who can predict what her husband will order at every restaurant.”

— Dolly Alderton

10. “Was it a game you wanted to complete? You met a woman who had her life together, and you wanted to see if you could pull it apart? You wanted to know that you could get her to fall in love with you, say all the things you wanted her to say, do all the things you wanted her to do, then the game was finished and you could turn it off?”

— Dolly Alderton

11. “There isn’t a pebble on the beach of my inner history that she has left unturned. She knows where to find everything in me and I know where all her stuff is too. She is, in short, my best friend.”

— Dolly Alderton

12. “If you lose respect for someone, you won’t be able to fall back in love with them.”

— Dolly Alderton

13. “I would like to pause the story a moment to talk about ‘nothing will change’. I’ve heard it said to me repeatedly by women I love during my twenties when they move in with boyfriends, get engaged, move abroad, get married, get pregnant. ‘Nothing will change.’ It drives me bananas. Everything will change. Everything will change. The love we have for each other stays the same, but the format, the tone, the regularity and the intimacy of our friendship will change for ever.”

— Dolly Alderton

14. “Maybe friendship is being the guardian of another person’s hope. Leave it with me and I’ll look after it for a while, if it feels too heavy for now.”

— Dolly Alderton

15. “I miss home.” I miss home. I miss home.”

— Dolly Alderton

16. “I am always half in life, half in a fantastical version of it in my head.”

— Dolly Alderton

17. “She knows where to find everything in me and I know where all her stuff is too. She is, in short, my best friend.”

— Dolly Alderton

18. “I think the memory of your childhood home is impossible to destroy.”

— Dolly Alderton

19. “Life is a wonderful, mesmerizing, magical, fun, silly thing. And humans are astounding. We all know we’re going to die, and yet we still live. We shout and curse and care when the full bin bag breaks, yet with every minute that passes we edge closer to the end. We marvel at a nectarine sunset over the M25 or the smell of a baby’s head or the efficiency of flat-pack furniture, even though we know that everyone we love will cease to exist one day. I don’t know how we do it.”

— Dolly Alderton

20. “You cannot predict how another person is going to behave in a relationship. You can risk-assess, you can be cautious, you can make sensible decisions about who you choose to trust and invite into your life and heart. But you can’t manage the untruly variables of another living, breathing human. To choose to love is to take a risk. Always. That’s why it’s called falling – no one meanders-with-a-compass-and-Ordnance-Survey-map into love.”

— Dolly Alderton

21. “Life is a difficult, hard, sad, unreasonable, irrational thing. So little of it makes sense. So much of it is unfair. And a lot of it simply boils down to the unsatisfying formula of good and bad luck.”

— Dolly Alderton

22. “You are the sum total of everything that has happened to you.”

— Dolly Alderton

23. “The love I felt was aggressive and fraught – I loved him with panic and passion. I didn’t fall in love; love fell on me. Like a ton of bricks from a great height.”

— Dolly Alderton

24. “Many times, I would invent a person in my head and create our chemistry as if writing a screenplay, and by the time we’d meet again in real life, I’d be crushingly let down.”

— Dolly Alderton

25. “On long, lonely nights when your fears crawl over your brain like cockroaches and you can’t get to sleep, dream of the time you were loved – in another lifetime, one of toil and blood. Remember how it felt to find shelter in someone’s arms. Hope that you’ll find it again.”

— Dolly Alderton

26. “Rambunctious, restless and ramshackle. Roving, raucous and rebellious. My roaming decade; my roaring twenties.”

— Dolly Alderton

27. “Nothing will change.” It drives me bananas. Everything will change. Everything will change. The love we have for each other stays the same, but the format, the tone, the regularity, and the intimacy of our friendship will change forever.”

— Dolly Alderton

28. “The perfect man is kind, funny and generous. He bends down to say hello to dogs and puts up shelves.”

— Dolly Alderton

29. “Why was a sprinkling of the patriarchy so good when it came to dating? I resented it. It was like good sea salt – just a tiny dash could really bring out the flavour of the date and it was so often delectable.”

— Dolly Alderton

30. “I have never hated anything as much as I hated being a teenager. I could not have been more ill-suited to the state of adolescence. I was desperate to be an adult, desperate to be taken seriously. I hated relying on anyone for anything.”

— Dolly Alderton

31. “If you feel exhausted by people, it’s because you’re willingly playing the martyr to make them like you. It’s your problem, not theirs.”

— Dolly Alderton

32. “Do you think we’d ever be friends if we met now?” “No, I don’t think so.” “Me neither.” “Sort of magic, isn’t it? To know that we could meet the most exciting person in the world, but they’d never be able to recreate the history you and I have. What a unique superpower we have over each other.”

— Dolly Alderton

33. “Growing up engenders self-awareness. And self-awareness kills a self-titled party girl stone-cold dead.”

— Dolly Alderton

34. “Mum was right, he didn’t need these relics of mundanity, but I understood his inclination to hold on to them. I too had shoe boxes of cinema tickets from first dates with Joe and utility bills from flats I no longer lived in. I’d never known why they were important, but they were – they felt like proof of life lived, in case a time came when it was needed, like a driving license or a passport.”

— Dolly Alderton

35. “He hated excessive displays of emotion, tall women wearing heels, or being too loud. So basically everything that made up my personality at the time. He thought I was a disaster, I thought he was a square.”

— Dolly Alderton

36. “You have to take your chance, it’s not like you fall in love with someone every week. How arrogant are you, that you think you’re going to feel like this again about someone whenever you decide you’re ready, on your terms?”

— Dolly Alderton

37. “Maybe you just have an unfillable void,’ he said with a gentle sigh. ‘Maybe no man will ever be able to fill it.”

— Dolly Alderton

38. “Remember how it felt to find shelter in someone’s arms. Hope that you’ll find it again.”

— Dolly Alderton

39. “It’s easier, being heartbroken in your thirties, because no matter how painful it is, you know it will pass. I don’t believe one other human has the power to ruin my life any more.”

— Dolly Alderton

40. “Men always have to keep a low flame burning for every ex. It will be flickering in there for him, even if he doesn’t know it is. Whereas women always have to extinguish it.”

— Dolly Alderton

41. “I know what it is to love someone and accept that you can’t change certain things about them;.”

— Dolly Alderton

42. “Love is homesickness,” I once read in a book. The author’s therapist had told her that the pursuit of love in adulthood is just an expression of missing our mums and dads – that we look for intimacy and romance because we never stop wanting parental security and attention. We simply displace it.”

— Dolly Alderton

43. “I’m fiscally conservative but socially liberal,” he said within the first two minutes of me asking him about his job. I wouldn’t be surprised if right-leaning thirty-somethings received a script in the post to prepare them for social situations.”

— Dolly Alderton

44. “To lower your heart rate and drift off on nights when sleep feels impossible, dream of all the adventures that lie ahead of you and the distances you’ve traveled so far. Wrap your arms tightly round your body and, as you hold yourself, hold this one thought in your head: I’ve got you.”

— Dolly Alderton

45. “Your life is here, now. You’re not about to live a tracing-paper copy of it.”

— Dolly Alderton

46. “The North London suburbs were a vacuum for identity. It was as beige as the plush carpets that adorned its every home. There was no art, no culture, no old buildings, no parks, no independent shops or restaurants... The only form of expression was through the spending of money on homogenized assets – conservatories, kitchen extensions, cars with built in satnav, all-inclusive holidays to Majorca.”

— Dolly Alderton

47. “But cynicism, while funny and self-protecting, is very easy. Finding trust, sustaining hope – that’s the real art form.”

— Dolly Alderton

48. “Therapy is a great big archaeological dig on your psyche until you hit something.”

— Dolly Alderton

49. “To be a desirable woman – the sky’s the limit. Have every surface of your body waxed. Have manicures every week. Wear heels every day. Look like a Victoria’s Secret Angel even though you work in an office. It’s not enough to be an average-sized woman with a bit of hair and an all-right sweater. That doesn’t cut it. We’re told we have to look like the women who are paid to look like that as their profession.”

— Dolly Alderton

50. “I wanted him inside me so I could search for the ghosts inside him. In the absence of any context for who he was, I was gathering forensics from the inerasable fingerprints that had been left by those who had handled him.”

— Dolly Alderton