Top 120 Holly Bourne Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Holly Bourne

103. “Why would anyone get drunk? Why does anyone need anything like that to escape the world, when the world is its own antidote?”

— Holly Bourne

104. “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

105. “Nobody tells you that large houses have this horrible habit of making you feel utterly alone.”

— Holly Bourne

106. “Were these my options? Easy lay or mental? A lie, or alone? Were these the only options boys gave you? Was it mental to want someone to love you? Was it mental to want to be courted before a guy but an actual piece of his body inside your body? Was it mental to want a message after you’d kissed someone? Was it mental to want the most normal thing in the world- a relationship? One that didn’t make your heart feel full of bogeys?”

— Holly Bourne

107. “The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.”

— Holly Bourne

108. “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

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

— Holly Bourne

110. “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

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

— Holly Bourne

112. “She needed to understand her pain and why it had brought her here.”

— Holly Bourne

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

— Holly Bourne

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

— Holly Bourne

115. “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

116. “I will always try to live.”

— Holly Bourne

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Holly Bourne

121. “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

122. “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

123. “I hit publish and slump back in this wet grass, waiting for the likes to come in. For my phone to come alive. I like how I look in this photo. I like the person this Tori is. This Tori has friends and a life and she doesn’t care and she has fun and don’t you wish you could be her? I wish I could be her.”

— Holly Bourne

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

— Holly Bourne

125. “He’s been so changeable with her I’m surprised he’s not been accepted to Hogwarts for his transfiguration skills.”

— Holly Bourne

126. “Just keep telling the truth, Paige,” he said. “I know it’s hurting, but it’s working.”

— Holly Bourne

127. “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

128. “It hadn’t felt safe. Then I told my story, and now I did.”

— Holly Bourne

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

— Holly Bourne

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

— Holly Bourne

131. “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

132. “Time can be strange sometimes. It can leave imprints in particular places, leaving ghosts of memories trapped.”

— Holly Bourne

133. “But what if you needed to get what you want... just once?”

— Holly Bourne

134. “Maybe all you needed in life was the belief you could change things. Somehow. Some way.”

— Holly Bourne

135. “She wouldn’t have understood. Or worse, she would’ve pretended to understand, but then got annoyed when her support didn’t magically cure me.”

— Holly Bourne

136. “Hell is other people and what they do in the anonymous dark of the cinema.”

— Holly Bourne

137. “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

138. “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

139. “She wasn’t blood, she didn’t grow up with me, but yet she could see it all...”

— Holly Bourne