Top 120 Holly Bourne Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

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

— Holly Bourne

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

— Holly Bourne

5. “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

6. “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

7. “Love isn’t just a feeling. Love is a choice too. And you may not be able to help your feelings, but you are responsible for the choices you make about what to do with them.”

— Holly Bourne

8. “Pain, loneliness, darkness.”

— Holly Bourne

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

— Holly Bourne

10. “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

11. “This is life, Lottie. There’s no such thing as a happy ending. Because there’s no such thing as an ending. More days keep coming, some good, some bad. You can’t just stay limboed in a moment of happiness. That’s not realistic.”

— Holly Bourne

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

— Holly Bourne

13. “Choose life. Choose love. And always remember to live.”

— Holly Bourne

14. “That the end of childhood is when you realize adults don’t really know what they’re doing.”

— Holly Bourne

15. “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

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

— Holly Bourne

17. “Good memories exist in the naivety of not knowing any better.”

— Holly Bourne

18. “Being in your thirties is like a game of Snakes and Ladders. You may think you’re beating everyone, but you’re only one dice-roll away from falling down a snake and suddenly coming last. And the person stuck on square four may randomly land on a ladder and suddenly overtake you in this game to get everything sorted before your ovaries go kaput.”

— Holly Bourne

19. “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

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

— Holly Bourne

21. “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

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

— Holly Bourne

23. “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

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

— Holly Bourne

25. “And always remember to live.”

— Holly Bourne

26. “If we expect all men to have six-packs and biceps, we can’t get mad when they expect us to be stick-figures with DD boobs.”

— Holly Bourne

27. “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

28. “It would’ve been the perfect time to tell her. To tell anyone. To say, ‘I’m drowning and I need someone, anyone, to be my life raft.’ To say, ‘I thought it had gone, and it hasn’t and I’m so scared by what that means.’ To say, ‘I just want to be normal, why won’t my head let me be normal?”

— Holly Bourne

29. “That’s how you give away your power, by caring what other people think. As long as nobody thought I was a nasty person, I didn’t worry about the rest. I mean, why bother? You couldn’t control it anyway.”

— Holly Bourne

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

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

— Holly Bourne

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

— Holly Bourne

39. “Life doesn’t always have to be about changing the world. Sometimes it’s about living your life for you. Trying to find some happiness, completely selfishly, but just for you.”

— Holly Bourne

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

43. “Being hurt or upset is no reason not to do something. In fact, sometimes the best things about people are the things that hurt them.”

— Holly Bourne

44. “You never know if happy memories are going to become sad ones. They glow and shine in the vast realms of our subconscious, making that part of our brain feel like it’s filled with glitter. We pick them up and cradle them like expensive cats, or wriggle into them like they are jumpers we’ve left to warm on a radiator. Until the day when, for one reason or another, life can suddenly make this happy memory into a sad memory instead. Good memories exist in the naivety of not knowing any better.”

— Holly Bourne

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

— Holly Bourne

46. “I have a sudden need to take a shower. A really long shower, scraping my skin clean until it is red raw.”

— Holly Bourne

47. “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

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

— Holly Bourne

49. “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

50. “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