Dear Dolly Quotes

“Keep putting love out into the world and it will come back to you in one way or another.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly

“...romantics are, ironically, the worst culprits for being relationship avoidant. This is for two reasons. The first being that committing to someone would mean they would have to call off the search for love, and nothing is more romantic than longing. The second is that they spend a lot of time thinking about who their partner might be, so it's hard to find the 3D version that matches who they've invented in their mind. It's less about perfection, and more about prescriptivism. They write their own version of how they think love is going to pan out, then they find it perplexing that no one seems to know the specific plot and characters other than them.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly

“It’s not the absence of fun, it’s the absence of fear.’ Keep this in mind when you are looking for someone to share your life with – someone who’ll bring fun without fear. Someone whose company you love. Someone who makes you feel alive and safe and understood. Those are the specifics you should be looking for. The rest doesn’t matter so much.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

“You don’t have to be a particular ‘kind of girl’ to be loved: you aren’t lacking in qualifications, you aren’t better suited to unrequited crushes.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

“Loving someone is not an act of control, it’s an act of surrender.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

“You should never place all your self-worth and happiness in the hands of someone you barely know.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

“Of all the people who have mistreated me over the years – who have said the cruellest, most inhibiting things – the one I most wish I could speak to is my younger self.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

“The world has been built for her to not forget about it. She's aware of it, continue not to mention it.

This is not something that's ever going to slip her mind.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly

“Being entertained, beguiled, or obsessed by the way someone thinks or communicates is an eternal pleasure.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly

“I once had my heart broken – a proper sledgehammer job – and I went for a drink with a friend who is happily married in her forties with a child. My tears collected in a wine glass and I told her that I wanted to sleep until it was over. She held me by the shoulders and said: ‘One day you’ll look back on this and you will think, I was never more alive.’ I don’t want to romanticize your pain, but I now understand exactly what she meant. Grief is an electric shock that tells us we are fully alive – it means we’re connecting and creating and caring. We’re participating. We’re making the most of this short go. We’re opening up and taking risks, we’re tangling ourselves in other lives.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly

“This struggle between wanting a rooted, domestic existence and a life of nomadic liberty is a very human instinct, one that has been examined endlessly in the psyche of male stories and tormented male protagonists. Now, it’s our turn to wrestle with this quandary.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

“Maybe you and this guy are meant to be with each other for a year, or five years, or a handful of months. That’s fine! That can still be a successful relationship! You will still have an opportunity to grow together, to enrich each other and teach each other and make some beautiful (or even just fun) memories together. You don’t have to wait for a precise moment when you know you will only be with each other for ever and ever, because otherwise you may not ever be with each other. Ask yourself which is the greater loss: having tried to be with someone you deem to be perfect and at some point breaking up or never having tried to be with them at all?”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

“It is easy to sleepwalk into a relationship with no personal standards because of fear that time is running out.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

“Finally, my most important piece of advice is to keep giving love to the women who have everything you want. Any time you feel jealous of your friends, make a promise to yourself to turn it into an act of love and it will neutralize any feelings of bitterness.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly

“Watching a best friend become a parent is a magical thing. It can open up a part of their personality that you've never seen before and it can also open a new chapter of your friendship.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly

“To feel like you can be with yourself – that you can keep yourself safe and be at peace in your own company – I now believe is the greatest and quietest confidence a human can know.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

“Grief is an electric shock that tells us we are fully alive- it means we´re conecting and creating and cating. We´re participating. We´re making the most of this short go. We´re opening up and taking risks, we´re tangling ourselvedes in other lives.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly

“It is a beautiful, terrifying fact: just as our vulnerability to heartbreak never changes, neither does our vunerability to fall in love.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly

“Humans are not only allowed to change, they´re suposed to change. It´s one of the risks of committing to a long-term relationship, we also have to commit to the unpredictable future versions of a person.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly

“Loving someone is not an act of control, it´s an act of surrender. (...) You have to surrender to the unknown variables of another human. Known them, trust them and hope for the best.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly

“Love is high-risk. Always.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly

“There is so much said about the joys of falling in love, but I don´t think enough is articulated about how terrifying it is.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly

“What got you here won’t get you there.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

“Being helpful to strangers when no one is there to see. Leaving relationships when they no longer make you happy. Campaigning for a cause you care about. Being able to laugh at yourself. Developing a work ethic that you can be proud of. Keeping yourself safe and healthy. Ambition. Curiosity. Knowing what you like in sex. Knowing how to change a light bulb, fuse or tyre. Saving spiders instead of swatting them. Any of these things will help. These very small, very unexciting steps are what build a sense of integrity and self-respect. They help make the mirror reflection feel a little less important. And the best part is, character is far more robust than appearance. Many variables can affect how we look – it’s so much harder to be robbed of your character.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

“Many variables can affect how we look – it’s so much harder to be robbed of your character. You will one day wish you could take back the time that self-hatred is currently occupying.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

“please remember that you haven’t failed at femininity by not withholding sex, when sex was exactly what you wanted.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

“A lot of boomers use the internet differently to us, and it’s because they didn’t grow up with it. We acquired the internet from childhood like a language – most of us are instinctively fluent in internet. I am reminded of this every time my mum checks her email and she goes into the Google search bar and writes ‘check my googlemail inbox’ and then clicks on the first result. ‘You know you can just write gmail.com into the browser, Mum,’ I tell her every time, inexplicably exasperated. ‘It will take you straight to your emails. You don’t have to search for it on Google.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

“By continually choosing to obsess over unattainable women, you are keeping yourself in a particular state of being single – one where you potentially cannot enjoy the freedoms of being young and unattached because you’re preoccupied with the torture of unrequited love.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

“Keep putting love out into the world and it will come back to you in one way or another. That, I’ve learnt, is one of life’s only guarantees.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

“Women should be allowed to take their lives in whichever direction works for them, without ranking those lifestyles in order of importance.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom