How Do You Like Me Now? Quotes

“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, How Do You Like Me Now?

“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, How Do You Like Me Now?

“But it takes strength to reject all the things the world tells you to be.”
― Holly Bourne, How Do You Like Me Now?

“It's not fair to set people tests and then get annoyed when they fail them.”
― Holly Bourne, How Do You Like Me Now?

“Somehow the gusts of wind we rode on in our twenties have landed us somewhere and we have to make this somewhere work. Because you can’t turn back the clock. It’s too late now to figure out whether you’re on the right gust or not. And you don’t want people to know you’re so stuck, and so scared and think it’s too late to get yourself out of this situation. You don’t want to fail when everyone else is supposedly thriving. And, you are happy, right? Sometimes you’re happy, anyway. And isn’t that what happiness is? Fleeting moments, rather than a permanent state of euphoria. And as long as it looks OK on the outside who cares, right?”
― Holly Bourne, How Do You Like Me Now?

“Turning thirty is like playing musical chairs. The music stops and everyone just fucking marries whoever they happen to be sitting on.”
― Holly Bourne, How Do You Like Me Now?

“Because maybe this is just what relationships are like.
Another scent of a thought. Love is not whispering romantic things under Egyptian cotton sheets. Love has nothing to do with how besotted you are in those heady first two years. The hormones die off – argument by argument. In time, you discover every single flaw they have, and they discover yours. Your baggage, your insecurities, your gross habits, your nasty streaks. This happens in every relationship, right? This feeling that there’s more. The fantasies of what your life would be like with an imaginary different person who doesn’t do the annoying shit this real human partner does. It’s called ‘settling down’ for a reason. Because long-term love always means settling. Settling is the key word.”
― Holly Bourne, How Do You Like Me Now?

“I find sentences pushing their way into my brain - demanding to be listened to. Words arranging themselves into order, feelings tapping me on the shoulder and begging to be understood. My mind is cluttered and busy and I know I won't relax until I let them out (...) You can do just as much damage by not saying anything as you can by saying something.”
― Holly Bourne, How Do You Like Me Now?

“think about the word ‘success’. I think about how often people use it about me. About how my time with that word is running out because the goalposts are changing. If I don’t get married and don’t have children then soon I will be seen as less successful. Even if my new book sells ten million copies, my lack of a man loving me, of that man spunking into my womb and growing a person, will deem me unsuccessful. ‘Because it came at a cost, didn’t it?’ they will say. And don’t pretend for a moment that they won’t say it.
‘I guess true success,’ I start to say, nervous I’ve got the answer wrong. ‘True success is living the life you want to live and not caring what other people think.”
― Holly Bourne, How Do You Like Me Now?

“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, How Do You Like Me Now?

“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, How Do You Like Me Now?

“Lost is easier than stuck …”
― Holly Bourne, How Do You Like Me Now?

“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, How Do You Like Me Now?

“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, How Do You Like Me Now?

“I've started to realise that you eclipsed every single part of me that made me, me.”
― Holly Bourne, How Do You Like Me Now?

“It's not far to set people tests and then get annoyed when they fail them.”
― Holly Bourne, How Do You Like Me Now?