Em > Em's Quotes

“When he pressed his palm over my mouth, I could see the woman who fucked him to feel freedom in disappearance. When he held a handful of my flesh in his hands, I could tell he’d loved a body more yielding than mine. His lips running along the arches of my feet let me know he had worshipped a woman in her entirety – that he had loved the bones of her toes as much as the brackets of her hips; that he had known her blood on his skin as well as he’d known her perfume on his sheets. He held me like a hot-water bottle when he slept and I knew that night after night after night he had shared a bed with another body and together they’d constructed an oasis from just a mattress.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“They were like teenage boys in their rooms, coming up with lyrics to write in their notebooks. They weren’t ready to be adults, to make any choices, let alone promises. They preferred a relationship to be virtual and speculative, because when it was virtual and speculative, it could be perfect.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“I was an adult woman with a mortgage, a career and a life full of
responsibilities. I was a little girl with a dying dad. And I didn’t know where
I wanted to go.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“Time and time again I observed that most men think a good conversation is a conversation where they have imparted facts or information that others didn’t already know, or dispensed an interesting anecdote, or given someone tips or advice on an upcoming plan or generally left their mark on the discourse like a streak of piss against a tree trunk.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“Love is homesickness,” I once read in a book. The author’s therapist had told her that the pursuit of love in adulthood is just an expression of missing our mums and dads—that we look for intimacy and romance because we never stop wanting parental security and attention. We simply displace it.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“Because these men wanted to want something rather than have something. Max wanted to be tortured, he wanted to yearn and chase and dream. He wanted to exist in a liminal state, like everything was just about to begin. He liked contemplating what our relationship might be like, without investing any time or commitment in our relationship.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is.
Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being in love, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.
Those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other underground, and, when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.”
― Louis de Bernières, Corelli’s Mandolin