Top 50 Naoise Dolan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Camera eats first.”

— Naoise Dolan

2. “You’re terrified of vulnerability. This is so both because others have been unkind to you in the past, and because you don’t like yourself and are sure anyone who gets close will agree. That’s what makes people afraid to offer you intimacy. They know you’ll reject it. You broke up with the love of your life because you saw how much power they had to hurt you.”

— Naoise Dolan

3. “I’d been sad in Dublin, decided it was Dublin’s fault, and thought Hong Kong would help.”

— Naoise Dolan

4. “I like talking to you,’ I said – quite stupidly, I realised. ‘It makes me feel solid, like someone can confirm I’m real.”

— Naoise Dolan

5. “You keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special – which is fair, who doesn’t – but you won’t allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you’re especially bad.”

— Naoise Dolan

6. “I looked out my window and told myself: it is fair enough to find it stressful that my entire life revolves around someone who does not care very much about me. This is a permissible experience.”

— Naoise Dolan

7. “I wanted to explain that to Edith: that holding Julian’s hand was like holding a museum pass, and holding hers was like holding a grenade.”

— Naoise Dolan

8. “I enjoyed conversations where I wasn’t attempting to persuade anyone, where I just said precisely what I thought. I got tired of making myself acceptable.”

— Naoise Dolan

9. “I don’t think you’re interested in having a nice life. Which is arrogant, really, because you expect other people to help you maintain an existence that you yourself can’t work up any enthusiasm over. Don’t take this personally, by the way. I’m just observing.”

— Naoise Dolan

10. “Sometimes i love you and sometimes i think it would be best if a plane flew into your office and you were on the plane or in the building.”

— Naoise Dolan

11. “My wanting to cry was a reflection mainly of my social conscience.”

— Naoise Dolan

12. “I wanted to tell him that in a framework where affection was circumspect, its overt forms were necessarily hostile. Look, I’d say, it’s like English grammar. It doesn’t make sense but it’s too late to change it.”

— Naoise Dolan

13. “The truth is, you like Julian because he enables this perception you have of yourself as a detached person. Plenty of people are willing to offer you intimacy. That terrifies you. You prefer feeling like no one will ever love you.”

— Naoise Dolan

14. “She seemed to think I couldn’t take compliments. I preferred to believe I disliked profuse displays of emotion and would accept any amount of praise if people tempered themselves in how they expressed it.”

— Naoise Dolan

15. “Women took care of men and let them pretend we didn’t.”

— Naoise Dolan

16. “During these outings I felt I had hitherto woefully misdirected my energies in attempting to cultivate a personality. If you didn’t have one then that left more room for everyone else’s.”

— Naoise Dolan

17. “I often lied to spare others’ feelings or to make them like me. Most of my directness was by accident. But I got more social capital from pretending it was on purpose, not least because it made people assume my compliments had to be sincere. Julian seemed to trust me. Smart people often did dumb things.”

— Naoise Dolan

18. “I wanted to tell someone that and have them say either: Ava you’re being unreasonable, or: Ava we all bear our crosses but your has the most nails. Anything but: sounds complicated.”

— Naoise Dolan

19. “In the now-empty box I wrote: i wish i knew how i felt about everything, then erased that too.”

— Naoise Dolan

20. “If asked ‘Why don’t men commit?’, you’ll say ‘They will, just not to you’; if asked ‘Why don’t women commit?’, you’ll say ‘Commit what, suicide?”

— Naoise Dolan

21. “It was like drinking something I’d been holding till it cooled, finding it still too hot, and gulping anyway because I’d been cold too long.”

— Naoise Dolan

22. “Most English people said ‘what’ as ‘wot’, though authors only spelled it ‘wot’ when the characters were poor.”

— Naoise Dolan

23. “I was scared with you as well, but I was ready to be scared.”

— Naoise Dolan

24. “Some mornings I didn’t leave the bed because then I’d have to brush my teeth, followed by a series of actions that amounted to living my life as the person I was. I was unable to drum up positivity about either dental hygiene or the rest of my day, so I told myself I was disgusting and lazy and I’d be late and they’d fire me, and then I got up. If you were really sick you couldn’t just harness your self-loathing like that, so I knew I was fine.”

— Naoise Dolan

25. “I thought that if i let anyone in, they’d find out what was broken about me. And then not only would they know, i’d know too.”

— Naoise Dolan

26. “I wanted people to know we were together, but only the ones who wouldn’t hurt us for it.”

— Naoise Dolan

27. “I found it deeply unfair that he’d known what he was going to say before I knew the conversation would even happen. Logically, I knew this was not a valid complaint. You had to arrange things in your head before you said them aloud, and it was a fact of leaving that one person knew before the other did. Really my grievance was that he was in charge and not me. But I couldn’t conscript him into staying with me, and anyway I didn’t like him very much.”

— Naoise Dolan

28. “There was no record of what had happened. I couldn’t fully believe it when it hadn’t been committed to paper. Maybe that’s why Sappho wrote poems – but when she died, they wrapped her papyrus around corpses to keep maggots off.”

— Naoise Dolan

29. “If she posted no evidence of her hectic life, I thought: she said she was busy. When she did post I thought: not too busy for Instagram.”

— Naoise Dolan

30. “The only thing we had in common was DNA, which gave us limited mileage conversationally.”

— Naoise Dolan

31. “Probably Edith did not feel things as strongly as I did. She was at an unfair advantage.”

— Naoise Dolan

32. “He was too self-assured to notice when I criticised him. He registered that I’d said something, then continued a parallel conversation.”

— Naoise Dolan

33. “We wondered about the straights. ‘They’re like pandas.’ Edith said. ‘You pity them in the zoo, but fling the cage open and they’ll stay there, chewing.”

— Naoise Dolan

34. “We both preferred me on top and I wondered if that said anything about our dynamic. I felt all your copulative leanings were meant to reveal something deep about you, and if they didn’t you had an uncompelling mind.”

— Naoise Dolan

35. “The trouble with my body was that I had to carry it around with me.”

— Naoise Dolan

36. “It was another of my favourite Edith expressions, though I knew there was limited point in recording them when I could not imagine a single expression of Edith’s which did not rank among my favourites. The best wedges of words were the ones my eight-year-olds wrote: I like her face. With her I am happy. I wished I’d never learned more advanced grammar and could only make sentences like that. It would give me an excuse to say them aloud.”

— Naoise Dolan

37. “Women in movies taught men how to feel things. They took men who felt nothing and made them feel something.”

— Naoise Dolan

38. “I felt disloyal to Edith when it made me smile, then to Julian because it was the kind of text Edith sent every day and I still appreciated it more from her than from him. This contravened all economics. Assuming my demand for nice messages was elastic, when they were scarcer it should surely drive up their value. But coming from Edith, they commanded a premium.”

— Naoise Dolan

39. “You broke up with the love of your life because you saw how much power they had to hurt you.”

— Naoise Dolan

40. “A few days into January, work started again. Madison from Texas greeted me by launching into a description of her new-year new-me fitness regimen. “I’m going to be me, but worse,” I said.”

— Naoise Dolan

41. “You could tell who’d been through it and who hadn’t because when you told someone who hadn’t, they were hungry for details. They’d say it was so they could experience their moral outrage with a loftier precision.”

— Naoise Dolan

42. “When I met someone I liked, I wanted all of them, and fast.”

— Naoise Dolan

43. “I couldn’t think of Julian for too long without cycling back to Edith. Most persons, places and things led me her way, but Julian especially triggered it. I sat there in Miles’s apartment and thought: Edith, and smiled.”

— Naoise Dolan

44. “Now twenty-three was shaping up to be the first year of my life where the idea of someone noticing me didn’t fill me with abject horror. I supposed later was better than never.”

— Naoise Dolan

45. “My desire was for Julian’s feelings to be stronger than mine. No one would sympathize with that. I wanted a power imbalance, and I wanted it to benefit me.”

— Naoise Dolan

46. “He’d said everything very slowly that night, so I’d assumed he was drunk – but he still did it sober, so I gathered he was rich.”

— Naoise Dolan

47. “Not wanting him to go was an emotion produced by me, not him. He’d witnessed me having and failing to smother a feeling, and said he’d noticed – and he profited, not me.”

— Naoise Dolan

48. “I have every respect for people who follow their passions, but I prefer stability.”

— Naoise Dolan

49. “I gave her the remote and she chose a channel showing Inglourious Basterds. She said the title was spelled that way because Tarantino had misspelled it in a leaked screenplay and then insisted he’d done it on purpose.”

— Naoise Dolan

50. “If the Irish didn’t aspirate and the English did then they were right, but if we did and the English didn’t then they were still right. The English taught us English to teach us they were right.”

— Naoise Dolan