Top 120 Holly Bourne Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “It hadn’t felt safe. Then I told my story, and now I did.”

— Holly Bourne

52. “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

53. “I hoped he wasn’t a secret chauvinist.”

— Holly Bourne

54. “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

55. “What was the point? What is the point in love, and promises of it, when it can just jump from one person to another like that?”

— Holly Bourne

56. “Ha, that’s the problem. You have to exert brain control in order to do it, and isn’t a lack of control over your brain why you’re in therapy in the first place?”

— Holly Bourne

57. “Soon my sobs dulled to a whimper. Soon my breathing came back. Soon I was able to get off the carpet. Soon I’d meet my friends for college and pretend it hadn’t happened.”

— Holly Bourne

58. “I’m conscious of laughing attractively, so when the photo goes up on the website in two months’ time, people will think I look pretty. Even though they’ll probably only scroll past to see what they look like, I must still look pretty.”

— Holly Bourne

59. “I don’t need to know whether or not we are capable of magic. Because learning to love yourself, and finding people who love yourself too, that’s the real magic.”

— Holly Bourne

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

— Holly Bourne

61. “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

62. “Is any broken heart ever worth it?”

— Holly Bourne

63. “Guts and hearts aren’t always the most compatible – I’m starting to learn that. They pull in different directions, ignoring one another when they really shouldn’t.”

— Holly Bourne

64. “There was a smell, a musty one that made you feel smarter and the need to talk quietly.”

— Holly Bourne

65. “Being a woman, in this world, ultimately makes you crazy.”

— Holly Bourne

66. “Because the week the cinema closed? Well. That was the week we broke up. Ahh, come on. You knew this was coming.”

— Holly Bourne

67. “Smiling is sometimes the only way to stop yourself from crying.”

— Holly Bourne

68. “Most of the time, life is all “What’s next?” “Who’s next?” “Where the HELL am I going, please?” But on anniversaries, you take the time to stop and look back and it’s like watching a play of your past dance across your memory. At.”

— Holly Bourne

69. “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

70. “The only love affair I needed to invest in right now was one with myself. Spend some time with me. Figuring out myself and why I picked the relationships I did. I was holding out my heart to me. Because I’d realised I was the only person who could give me a happily-ever-after.”

— Holly Bourne

71. “I smiled back at Ma because smiling is sometimes the only way to stop yourself crying.”

— Holly Bourne

72. “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

73. “I think real kindness, real compassion, is having the strength to stop and try and see where another person is coming from. To try and work out why they’re being the way they’re being. It takes time and patience. It’s not easy, but that’s real kindness.”

— Holly Bourne

74. “There’s a certain type – who use their diagnosis like a human shield. They think it’s a reason to find offence in anything. Accuse everyone of triggering them. Act like the world should wrap them up in cotton wool and lie coats over puddles for them just because they’re on antidepressants or whatever.”

— Holly Bourne

75. “Sometimes it only takes one person to tell you a different story. A person you love and respect.”

— Holly Bourne

76. “I’d been playing a game that was impossible to win. For a prize that didn’t exist.”

— Holly Bourne

77. “Sometimes that’s all you can do in life, when it comes to pain – try and understand it. We all carry scars and scorch marks around with us. We cuddle up each night with ghosts of damaging memories – we let them swirl around our heads, never able to settle or heal because we can’t make sense of this terrible thing that happened to us, and why we’re finding it so impossible to get over. You can’t force pain to leave until it’s ready to.”

— Holly Bourne

78. “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

79. “So you gotta fight for your right to be ruddy miserable.”

— Holly Bourne

80. “Jane simpered and curled herself back around Joel, like he’d said something romantic rather than creepy and sinister.”

— Holly Bourne

81. “What I couldn’t handle wasn’t the dropping of me as a friend – although that stung like an African Killer Bee – but the selling out of who-you-are and what’s-important-to-you just because a boy likes it. To me that made you a traitor against girl kind... against yourself.”

— Holly Bourne

82. “I can’t, guys,” I said. “Tonight I’m making a cherry pie from scratch.”

— Holly Bourne

83. “Crying is a very obvious sign that something isn’t going right in your life. You should not ignore tears.”

— Holly Bourne

84. “Love, as always, is what it comes down to. You have to love. It’s the only way. Love for life. Love for others. And, most importantly, love for yourself.”

— Holly Bourne

85. “It was like I’d climbed Everest, had the summit in my sight, the flag in my hand, all ready to pierce it into the top of the mountain and say, “Whoopdedoo, I made it,” and then an avalanche from out of nowhere swept me right back to the bottom of the mountain again. Was it worth bothering to try and climb it again? I was exhausted. I’d already climbed it. I didn’t want to... but, then, what other choice was there?”

— Holly Bourne

86. “Did all the horrid little moments where girls got treated like crap somehow create a society where the horrid big moments could happen.”

— Holly Bourne

87. “Yes. I thought maybe our relationship was different. Maybe it was, for a little while. But I’m not giving you the opportunity to break my heart again, Harry. Maybe this time you’ve broken your own too, and maybe you won’t do anything like this again. I’m not willing to take that chance though.”

— Holly Bourne

88. “His heart had changed channels, even though our show was still playing.”

— Holly Bourne

89. “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

90. “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

91. “Of course, you’re always a cynic before you fall in love yourself...”

— Holly Bourne

92. “It’s hard enough, feeling the clock ticking and yet life not obliging to give you the things others have. To feel defunct and left behind and scared as hell about it – and the more nervous you get about it, the more you give off some smell that makes it less likely to happen.”

— Holly Bourne

93. “Well, the weird thing about people,” polly said, “it’s, so very often, they’d rather feel important than feel happy.”

— Holly Bourne

94. “I just don’t think it’s possible for anyone in the world to love anyone as much as I love you right now.”

— Holly Bourne

95. “All I’m saying is, love changes over time. No person is ever perfect for another person.”

— Holly Bourne

96. “Who cares what a writer looks like as long as their words are beautiful?”

— Holly Bourne

97. “It’s not fair to set people tests and then get annoyed when they fail them.”

— Holly Bourne

98. “I wanted to grab his mum’s face and yell, “I’m not a horrible person, I’m not. But I’m broken too and I’ve never been on the recovering end of this behaviour before and I can’t handle it and I have to look after me first, before anyone else.”

— Holly Bourne

99. “I mean, if I want to kiss someone, it’s like fighting an addiction not getting to kiss them.”

— Holly Bourne

100. “I caught up with him and he slung an arm around me, casually, like he’d been allowed to put his arm around me for years.”

— Holly Bourne