Top 100 Dolly Alderton Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “They weren’t ready to be adults, to make any choices, let alone promises. They preferred a relationship to be virtual and speculative, because when it was virtual and speculative, it could be perfect. Their girlfriend didn’t have to be human. They didn’t have to think about plans or practicalities, they weren’t burdened with the concern of another person’s happiness.”

— Dolly Alderton

52. “Absolutely everyone is dysfunctional on some level, but a lot of people can function dysfunctionally.”

— Dolly Alderton

53. “I vow to always let you grow. I’ll never tell you that I know who you really are just because we’ve known each other since we were kids.”

— Dolly Alderton

54. “No one has ever asked you to make a floor-to-ceiling-sized friendship collage for their birthday. Or ring them three times a day. No one will cry if you don’t invite them to dinner because you don’t have enough chairs. 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

55. “Send letters,” Annie said one morning as she sat reading through a huge pile of cards and letters from people offering their condolences. “I used to always worry when I heard something bad had happened to someone that writing would be an intrusion. It’s never an intrusion, it always helps. If there’s one thing we can learn from this, it’s to always just send the letter.”

— Dolly Alderton

56. “It’s like what Joe said in his groom’s speech: love is being the guardian of another person’s solitude. 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

57. “My mum often told me this was a misguided act of feminism; that emulating the most loutish behavior of men was not a mark of equality.”

— Dolly Alderton

58. “I thought that, to be a writer, I had to be a collector of experiences.”

— Dolly Alderton

59. “Unless someone dies, if a relationship goes wrong, you somehow had a part to play in it. How simultaneously freeing and overwhelming it is to know this. Men aren’t bad, women aren’t good. People are people and we all make, allow, and enable mistakes.”

— Dolly Alderton

60. “There are so many reasons a person might be single at thirty or forty or a hundred and forty and it doesn’t make them ineligible. Everyone has history. Take the time to hear theirs.”

— Dolly Alderton

61. “So much of the love you feel for a person is dependent on the vast archive of shared memories you can access just by seeing their face or hearing their voice.”

— Dolly Alderton

62. “I could never get on board with this sort of girl-gang feminism, the groups of female friends who called themselves things like ‘the coven’ on social media and exhibited moral superiority from simply having a weekly brunch with each other. Having friends doesn’t make you a feminist; going on about female friendship doesn’t make you a feminist.”

— Dolly Alderton

63. “No one can stay young for ever, even when youth seems such an integral part of who they are. It’s such a simple rule of being human, and yet one I regularly found impossible to grasp. Everyone gets old.”

— Dolly Alderton

64. “She was both the most tragically insecure and beguilingly confident person I had ever met. And she loved fun, which was infectious. Her pursuit of new experiences was a preoccupation, and her permanent state of being single had given her the time to make an ongoing project of her own life.”

— Dolly Alderton

65. “All the hours lost in the cul-de-sac of your head torturing yourself with all the stupid things you said and did, hating yourself for the following few days.”

— Dolly Alderton

66. “Being a heterosexual woman who loved men meant being a translator for their emotions, a palliative nurse for their pride and a hostage negotiator for their egos.”

— Dolly Alderton

67. “I think something happens in your thirties where you slightly let go of this idea of the perfect career. I have so much fun outside of work, maybe it’s enough that it’s just fine. It pays okay, I get on with my colleagues. At the end of the day, it’s just ye olde day job.”

— Dolly Alderton

68. “The contents of supermarket baskets are surely evidence that none of us are coping with adulthood all that well.”

— Dolly Alderton

69. “You should never have to work to hold a man’s attention. If a man needs to be ‘kept interested’ in you, he’s got problems that are not your business to manage.”

— Dolly Alderton

70. “It is our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.” Marcel Proust.”

— Dolly Alderton

71. “People meet with pain they are not even aware they harbor.”

— Dolly Alderton

72. “Not for the first time upon looking in on my friends’ long-term relationships, I marveled at how a marriage ironically seemed to provide men of my generations with even more of an excuse to not grow up.”

— Dolly Alderton

73. “It’s so hard to trace which memories are yours and which ones you’ve borrowed from photo albums and family folklore and appropriated as your own.”

— Dolly Alderton

74. “Time and time again, I had created intensity with a man and confused it with intimacy.”

— Dolly Alderton

75. “I hadn’t ever thought that a man could love me in the same way that my friends love me; that I could love a man with the same commitment and care with which I love them. Maybe all this time I had been in a great marriage without even realising.”

— Dolly Alderton

76. “On our first visit, he ominously told us that if we ‘fell into any trouble with any gangs’ to come to him immediately as it would be ’dealt with.”

— Dolly Alderton

77. “I stretched out diagonally in my bed, across the cool sheet. I was completely alone, but I had never felt safer. It wasn’t the bricks around me that I’d somehow managed to rent or the roof over my head that I was most grateful for. It was the home I now carried on my back like a snail. The sense that I was finally in responsible and loving hands. Love was there in my empty bed.”

— Dolly Alderton

78. “You know, every time you ‘change your mind’ in such an extreme way, it takes something from a woman. It’s an act of theft. It’s not just a theft of her trust, it’s a theft of her time. You’ve taken things from her, so you could have a fun few months. Can you not see how selfish that is?”

— Dolly Alderton

79. “How did these women do it? What was their secret? What unexpected, mystical orifice on their body did they allow these men entry to that in turn made them do whatever unreasonable thing they wanted? Or was it that they simply told them what to do and when to do it, and the imposed restriction of choice made their boyfriends feel safely shepherded rather than ready for slaughter? Had I been treating men too much like adults and not enough like little directionless lambs?”

— Dolly Alderton

80. “My friends, quite rightly, thought I was insane to have become so quickly obsessed with someone I didn’t know. But they were also used to it – me finding a new love interest had always been like a greedy child opening a toy on Christmas Day. I ripped the packaging open, got frustrated trying to make it work, played with it obsessively until it broke, then chucked the broken pieces of plastic in the back of a cupboard on Boxing Day.”

— Dolly Alderton

81. “And the more perfect I strived to be, the more imperfections I noticed. I had been more body confident as a size 14 than I was over three stone lighter.”

— Dolly Alderton

82. “It is the sense of being a time millionaire – having oodles and oodles of options. I will forever mourn the teenage and twenty-something feeling of being a proprietor of endless empty minutes; of having boundless days ahead of me. I think, whatever age I am, I’ll always be searching for stacks more of it.”

— Dolly Alderton

83. “Getting older was an increasingly perplexing thing, but these moments – understanding that potential future memories were being taken from you year on year, like road closures – were the very worst of it.”

— Dolly Alderton

84. “Do as much good as you can. The weighty representation of the world cannot rest on every decision you make.”

— Dolly Alderton

85. “I was grateful for understanding in that moment that life can really be as simple as just breathing in and out.”

— Dolly Alderton

86. “It was at this time that I was reminded of the chain of support that keeps a sufferer afloat – the person at the core of a crisis needs the support of their family and best friends, while those people need support from their friends, partners and family. Then even those people twice removed might need to talk to someone about it too. It takes a village to mend a broken heart.”

— Dolly Alderton

87. “I hadn’t realized quite how much of early-days dating was pretending to be unbothered, or busy, or not that hungry, or demonstratively ‘low-key’ about everything.”

— Dolly Alderton

88. “I often hear married people say that they’re never aware of each other aging. Some sort of survivalist magic akin to Shakespearean comedy must descend on long-term couples at the very beginning of their relationship that means they only ever see the face they fell in love with.”

— Dolly Alderton

89. “I would make a strong case for the argument that every adult on this earth is sitting on a bench waiting for their parents to pick them up, whether they know it or not. I think we wait until the day we die.”

— Dolly Alderton

90. “But I think you might be right, I think I’ve created a version of him too. Or maybe that’s all love is. So much is how we perceive someone and the memories we have of them, rather than the facts of who they are. Maybe instead of saying I love you we should say I imagine you.”

— Dolly Alderton

91. “Boys fascinated me and frightened me in equal measure.”

— Dolly Alderton

92. “Unless someone dies,” she told me one Friday, “if something bad happens in a relationship, you have played a part in it.”

— Dolly Alderton

93. “Fine, MyFace. All of those websites that make you obsess over ‘who you are’ and how to explain it to everyone. You don’t need to explain it to everyone all the time! In our day, ‘who you are’ was just the thing that happened when you got out of bed and got on with the day.”

— Dolly Alderton

94. “I didn’t fall in love; love fell on me.”

— Dolly Alderton

95. “A lot of it was just a really good time on our own terms – many of the memories revolve around me and one of the girls leaving a situation we were bored of or didn’t like, just to spend time with each other.”

— Dolly Alderton

96. “I break myself off into different bits to give to different people, rather than being whole. I’m so restless and unsettled. I don’t know how to be without all the things I use to prop me up.”

— Dolly Alderton

97. “But I think maybe every job is a waste of an English degree.”

— Dolly Alderton

98. “I liked feeling like I was a precious and valuable thing to be guarded, like a diamond necklace in transit with a security guard. Why was a sprinkling of the patriarchy so good when it came to dating?”

— Dolly Alderton

99. “Because these men wanted to want something rather than have something. Max wanted to be tortured, he wanted to yearn and chase and dream. He wanted to exist in a liminal state, like everything was just about to begin. He liked contemplating what our relationship might be like, without investing any time or commitment in our relationship.”

— Dolly Alderton

100. “Jethro’s flat was in a warehouse that, even from the outside, looked very pleased with its own conversion.”

— Dolly Alderton