Top 120 Holly Bourne Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You don’t have to stop looking after yourself just to help the world. In fact, sometimes it’s better for the world if you put yourself first. That’s not being selfish, in fact looking after yourself is the greatest act of kindness you can give the world. Loving yourself first is the best way to spread love.”

— Holly Bourne

2. “Why love is never like the movies.”

— Holly Bourne

3. “Real love doesn’t mend everything. Real love doesn’t conquer all. And, most importantly, real love doesn’t require a happily-ever-after – that’s not what it’s about. But real love does change you. It moulds you. It burns your heart into a charred cinder that relights like a phoenix, stronger and more blazing than ever.”

— Holly Bourne

4. “Pain, loneliness, darkness.”

— Holly Bourne

5. “Self-hatred is like a snake eating its own tail. It feeds on itself – the bacteria of it spawning more bacteria until the infection is out of control.”

— Holly Bourne

6. “I’ve tried to hate you. I’ve tried to feel numb about you. I’ve tried to not even think about you at all. But I’m exhausted, Katie. I can’t not love you, even after everything. I can’t not feel anything for you. Every feeling I have, every inch of my heart – it’s yours. It always has been...”

— Holly Bourne

7. “The true test of life isn’t how you cope when everything is going in your favour; it’s how you deal with things that could destroy you, if you let them.”

— Holly Bourne

8. “Remind yourself it’s better to be lonely than hurt. It’s better to be alone than in a room full of people who can turn on you.”

— Holly Bourne

9. “I’m not a cynic,” I protested. “I’m a terminal pessimist with an edge of angry realism.”

— Holly Bourne

10. “But it takes strength to reject all the things the world tells you to be.”

— Holly Bourne

11. “British?” I tried to explain. “We make jokes about uncomfortable topics to feel less awkward about them?” How Hard Can Love Be? chapter 22.”

— Holly Bourne

12. “I’d seen too much pain from love. I couldn’t be with someone who had stung me sharply so early on. I wasn’t strong enough. I wasn’t... romantic enough to work through it. Because what I’d learned was love isn’t just a feeling. Love is a choice too.”

— Holly Bourne

13. “If you don’t say anything bad about other people, it is less likely that they will say bad things about you.”

— Holly Bourne

14. “It was all very well being a strong independent woman, but it was hard when boys’ confusing behaviour kept making you lose your focus.”

— Holly Bourne

15. “And always remember to live.”

— Holly Bourne

16. “Because there’s nothing more comforting than someone who actually gets it. Really gets it. Because they’ve been to the same hell as you have and can verify you’ve not made it up.”

— Holly Bourne

17. “So many people behave like they think a cinema orchestra is following them around to give them backing music, that they’re the superstar of the universe... and the people who believe this way, they’re the people who tend to hurt others the most. They think they’re the hero of their own story, but, actually, in the pursuit of being so important, they’re often the villain of everyone else’s.”

— Holly Bourne

18. “I’m terrified that my journey won’t tie up all the loose ends nicely. Because this is a life, not just a story, and life doesn’t always go the way stories tell you.”

— Holly Bourne

19. “What people don’t understand about feeling such potent sadness is, when it lifts, it really lets you know what happiness means.”

— Holly Bourne

20. “It’s easy to fall in love when you’re young and the sun is shining and you feel like the world is just there to have an argument with, with someone you adore by your side. But then life happens, and you start fighting against them, rather than with them... You should always pick someone who’s on your side, Amber. It’s too hard to be fighting the world and the person you love.”

— Holly Bourne

21. “I’m boring. I’m a nobody. I don’t live life. I don’t embrace life.”

— Holly Bourne

22. “I didn’t really have any sharable anecdotes. That’s the thing about anxiety – it limits your experiences so the only stories you have to tell are the “I went mad” ones.”

— Holly Bourne

23. “Nobody really likes coffee. They just pretend to because drinking coffee makes them feel like a proper adult.”

— Holly Bourne

24. “Because trying to use logic to explain anxiety is like using a banana to open a locked safe.”

— Holly Bourne

25. “Almost there... ” I said, like I was taking my child to Disneyland.”

— Holly Bourne

26. “Maybe people like you and me are just prime numbers. We don’t neatly divide into a world that demands order. And they keep trying to find out why, and what makes us the way we are, but they can’t.”

— Holly Bourne

27. “Bad stuff happens, people are mean, there are no steps you can take that ensure the world leaves you alone. All you can do is try not to be one of those people who contributes to the bad.”

— Holly Bourne

28. “You can build a relationship for so many years. You can grow it and nurture it, give it foundations and walls, and tinker with how you want it decorated. Then in just one moment, you can blow at it gently by telling the truth and the relationship collapses like a teetering house of cards. Years of careful craftsmanship. One conversation to undo it all.”

— Holly Bourne

29. “There are the times when the only appropriate thing to do is stop crying, let it go, with light and love in your heart, and to continue living your life to the best of your ability.”

— Holly Bourne

30. “Only time knows if this is a mistake, if we are worth the risk we’re about to take.”

— Holly Bourne

31. “If you’re not scared, then it’s not courage.”

— Holly Bourne

32. “I love the men who don’t need sisters and daughters and wives to make us human and not want us hurt.”

— Holly Bourne

33. “No one ever tells you how much a heartbreak physically hurts. How it literally feels like you’ve been kicked down the stairs. How you can’t swallow. How every muscle aches. How your heart lurches inside you like it’s been poisoned. Nobody tells you that.”

— Holly Bourne

34. “Reality doesn’t wait for you to be ready for it. It doesn’t go away when you tell it to. It’s like a persistent mosquito, determined to suck your blood and leave you with a bumpy itch that you can’t stop scratching.”

— Holly Bourne

35. “Though the world was hazy, all I could think about was love. And how I’d never had it. How I would never understand what it felt like to fall asleep knowing another person was thinking of you. I would never have someone touch the small of my back as they steered me through a crowd. I would never know the contour of someone’s face off-by-heart, and yet not be bored with it. And, as I sank to the grey, chewing-gum stained carpet, all I could think was how sad that was.”

— Holly Bourne

36. “Everyone’s on the cliff edge of normal. Everyone finds life an utter nightmare sometimes, and there’s no ‘normal’ way of dealing with it... There is no normal, Evelyn.”

— Holly Bourne

37. “What nobody tells you about your twenties is that you lose the methods with which to measure who you are, and how well you’re doing. That’s what causes so many of the problems.”

— Holly Bourne

38. “Life’s just a complicated mess with absolutely no purpose.”

— Holly Bourne

39. “Do you think maybe your writing isn’t going anymore because you’re unhappy? Because you’re not living the life you could? A life worth writing about? You must know that cliche-write what you know-but what do you know, Bree, when you shut the world out?”

— Holly Bourne

40. “Being interesting isn’t important. But being happy is. As well as being a person you’re proud of.”

— Holly Bourne

41. “Everyone’s always scared for someone else’s generation.”

— Holly Bourne

42. “What’s more painful – torturing yourself with happy memories or torturing yourself with bad ones?”

— Holly Bourne

43. “Life doesn’t happen to you. You can’t just sit on a park bench and expect amazing things to whizz by on a conveyor belt. Life is what you put into it.”

— Holly Bourne

44. “I want to change things on my own terms, to show that there’s no right or wrong way to change the world. There’s no entry test. You don’t need to suck anything up. Pay any dues. Just you and your anger and your voice is enough. If you only have the courage to use it.”

— Holly Bourne

45. “Happy endings are reserved strictly for the fiction shelves of bookstores.”

— Holly Bourne

46. “Trauma is trauma. Your brain and body don’t differentiate between physical and emotional abuse. They only respond to attack.”

— Holly Bourne

47. “Life is so bloody hard. I don’t want the whole struggle to be pointless. If I’m going to get crap thrown at me from great heights my whole life, well, I want to damn well make sure I leave a mark on this world in exchange for all the misery.”

— Holly Bourne

48. “But I was choosing to walk away from that. Because my heart... my heart was too fragile for someone who had chosen to break it.”

— Holly Bourne

49. “I don’t know. How are you supposed to know? Why can’t God come down from the sky with a giant foam finger, point at some bloke, and say, “That one, Evie, you’re supposed to fall in love with that one. He’s not a douche, I checked for you.”

— Holly Bourne

50. “Yes, well, rein it in, Prom King. British people have been successfully repressing our emotions since before your country was even a thing.” We.”

— Holly Bourne