Top 150 Dolly Alderton Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “Being a detective for your past – tracing back through all of it to get to the source with the help of a professional – can be incredibly useful and freeing.”

— Dolly Alderton

104. “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

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

— Dolly Alderton

106. “A boy coming up on acid heard repetitive ringing coming from my tent and thought it was Kraftwerk doing a surprise set.”

— Dolly Alderton

107. “I soon realized that inevitability of every relationship: the things which initially draw you to each other become the exact things that irritate you the most.”

— Dolly Alderton

108. “I’m an artist, this is what we do. We overanalyse. We masticate our misery until it’s pulverized enough to swallow.”

— Dolly Alderton

109. “Every heterosexual woman I know is emotionally paralysed in relationships by this fear of “scaring men off”. Then you have your Lucys of this world, these total anomalies, who know what they want and say: “I’m the boss, here are the rules, do as I say.” And so many men seem to love it. Like it’s a relief, or something.”

— Dolly Alderton

110. “Being entertained, beguiled, or obsessed by the way someone thinks or communicates is an eternal pleasure.”

— Dolly Alderton

111. “Would he put all his energy into being content with what he had, rather than yearning for the past and longing for something else in the future? Or would it actually get worse?”

— Dolly Alderton

112. “It wasn’t so much the concept of getting older that I found so overwhelming, but rather the transference from what I perceived to be one definite phase of life to another.”

— Dolly Alderton

113. “I didn’t want to know all these words, charged with urgency and crisis. I didn’t feel like they related to me. Hadn’t I just turned twenty-one? Hadn’t I just left university? Hadn’t my life only just begun? I couldn’t fathom how I had got here so quickly and how I could be expected to make such enormous decisions while I still felt so young. How had this happened?”

— Dolly Alderton

114. “We finished was such a dishonest retelling of how we’d ended, implying consent and communication, but now was not the time to debate wording.”

— Dolly Alderton

115. “I think of the possibility that I will never hear her laugh again, never buy her a birthday present, never guess what she wants from the takeaway menu, never hear her secrets or kiss the petals of her eyelids. I take a photo on my phone of the jumper and the shirt in case I forget what it feels like to be loved. I close the curtains and get into the bed I’ve been sleeping in since I was a little boy. And I cry and cry and cry and cry.”

— Dolly Alderton

116. “He would have loved me unquestioningly and stubbornly forever. And I don’t know if I want to be loved like that.”

— Dolly Alderton

117. “Summer soon. Long days, long nights, light at all hours, illuminating everything. Nowhere to hide.”

— Dolly Alderton

118. “It’s not the absence of fun, it’s the absence of fear.’ Keep this in mind when you are looking for someone to share your life with – someone who’ll bring fun without fear. Someone whose company you love. Someone who makes you feel alive and safe and understood. Those are the specifics you should be looking for. The rest doesn’t matter so much.”

— Dolly Alderton

119. “I didn’t wear a bra, simply to show off that I don’t have to wear a bra, which is a paltry consolation for having such small breasts. But I didn’t mind any more – I had become mostly indifferent to my body.”

— Dolly Alderton

120. “Morrissey once described his teenage life as “waiting for a bus that never came”; a feeling that’s only exacerbated when you come of age in a place that feels like an all-beige waiting room.”

— Dolly Alderton

121. “Bon Iver released a new single two days ago. I’ve been storing it up for my train journey back to London for maximum wallowing.”

— Dolly Alderton

122. “I want to talk to her about how I feel, but it’s not even interesting to me any more. And I don’t know how to choose the right words to correctly represent all the thoughts and the feeling that are piling up inside me. Women think we don’t want to talk to them about our emotions because we’re embarrassed of being vulnerable. It’s more that we’re embarrassed of seeming stupid.”

— Dolly Alderton

123. “He’d noticed I hadn’t been myself over the last few weeks and he’d kept asking me what was wrong. It was torture because he was my best friend and I told him everything. But I couldn’t tell him this, because the minute I said it out loud I knew we couldn’t come back from it. I don’t know if we’re right for each other, I don’t want your children, I don’t want anyone’s children, I don’t know if I want to be someone’s girlfriend. That would be it. The End.”

— Dolly Alderton

124. “When someone says they don’t want to be with you, you feel the pain of every single one of those times in life where you felt like you weren’t good enough. You live through it all again... You have to be prepared to let go and let go and let go a thousand times.”

— Dolly Alderton

125. “And if I start a new sub-genre of love with someone else, am I allowed to bring in all the things I loved from the last one? Or would that be weird?”

— Dolly Alderton

126. “He took off his denim jacket and draped it around my shoulders because I was cold. I could tell he was just as cold as I was, but I didn’t want to stop his big show of masculinity. How could I? I’d bought front-row tickets to it. I wondered how much of his behaviour this evening had been dictated by a pressure to perform his gender in such a demonstrative way. But then again, what was I doing? Why was I wearing a pair of four-inch heels that gave me blisters?”

— Dolly Alderton

127. “Nearly everything I know about love, I’ve learnt in my long-term friendships with women. Particularly the ones I have lived with at one point or another.”

— Dolly Alderton

128. “There’s nothing for me to gain from the value of mistakes any more.”

— Dolly Alderton

129. “You are locked in a prison of your own nostalgia. You need to let go of the past.”

— Dolly Alderton

130. “It’s weird not being in our subculture of two any more.”

— Dolly Alderton

131. “It’s all so random and unfair – the people we want to be with don’t want to be with us and the people who want to be with us are not the people we want to be with.”

— Dolly Alderton

132. “You don’t have to be a particular ‘kind of girl’ to be loved: you aren’t lacking in qualifications, you aren’t better suited to unrequited crushes.”

— Dolly Alderton

133. “Feeling the absence of someone’s company and the absence of their love are two different things.”

— Dolly Alderton

134. “Why is it that London always seems the most alive and full of possibility on the nights when you’ve got no plans?”

— Dolly Alderton

135. “Here’s something I’ve learnt about telling a story from the time I’ve spent on stage: the details are what’s important.”

— Dolly Alderton

136. “You’re trying to lead two lives,” a friend once said to me when I was on the brink of exhaustion. “You have to choose which you’d rather be: the woman who parties harder than anyone else or the woman who works harder than anyone else.”

— Dolly Alderton

137. “Love should be about aligning your life with another person, not a place of make-believe you can escape to where you always feel high, are the star of the show and unquestioningly adored.”

— Dolly Alderton

138. “But do I ever think about what my life would have been like had I been brave enough to not become a mother? Had I been brave enough to even imagine what that life could have been like?” “Do you?” I asked, checking she was still on the line. “I think about it all the time,” she said. We said goodbye, knowing that was most likely the last time we would ever speak to each other.”

— Dolly Alderton

139. “Thirty-five is the youth of middle age,’ I say. ‘We’re at the first stage of something new rather than being at the last stage of being young. I felt relieved when I turned thirty-five. It was like turning eighteen again.”

— Dolly Alderton

140. “Break-ups can be a good thing,” Jane says. “They can teach us about who we really are.” “Yeah, maybe, like, break-up number one or two,” I sigh. “But break-ups have depreciating gains. I’m thirty-five now. I know who I am. I am already sick of myself.”

— Dolly Alderton

141. “And I thought: if I feel single, wouldn’t it be easier to be single? And then I wouldn’t have to worry about disappointing someone or someone disappointing me? When I’m single, I know where I am. I am alone when I’m ill, but I’m not abandoned.”

— Dolly Alderton

142. “Do the transgressions of the artist undermine the pleasure to be found in the art?”

— Dolly Alderton

143. “But I’m not a member of that club any more. No one is. It’s been disbanded, dissolved, the domain is no longer valid. So what do I do with all its stuff? Where do I put it all? Where do I take all my new discoveries now I’m no longer in a tribe of two? And if I start a new sub-genre of love with someone else, am I allowed to bring in all the things I loved from the last one? Or would that be weird? Why do I find this so hard?”

— Dolly Alderton

144. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted. Good humor and good friends. Wisdom and humility. Confidence. Bravery. An unlabored sense of self. So why was I freaking out now that I’d finally started making some of it real? Somewhere in my young adult life, patriarchal snipers must have hacked into the most sacred and high-security part of my system without my knowledge and tried to rewire me. To make me believe that life would only be meaningful – that I would only be powerful – as a twenty-something.”

— Dolly Alderton

145. “I’m someone who lives in their had, I’d like to at least try to live in my body too.”

— Dolly Alderton

146. “And the truth is, I was only ever going out to find someone to stay in with.’ He half laughs at his own sentimentality. ‘I don’t do well without responsibilities. I’ve accepted that I’m quite a boring bloke. I like having people to look after and feed.”

— Dolly Alderton

147. “Loving someone is not an act of control, it’s an act of surrender.”

— Dolly Alderton

148. “There are so many hidden miniature break-ups within a big break-up.”

— Dolly Alderton

149. “Let your friends abandon you for a relationship once. The good ones will always come back.”

— Dolly Alderton

150. “I’d noticed this was a thing that people did when they got into their thirties: they saw every personal decision you made as a direct judgement on their life.”

— Dolly Alderton