Ghosts Dolly Alderton Quotes

Maybe friendship is being the guardian of another person's hope. Leave it with me and I'll look after it for a while , if it feels too heavy for now.

So much of the love you feel for a person is dependent on the vast archive of shared memories you can access just by seeing their face or hearing their voice.

Being a heterosexual woman who loved men meant being a translator for their emotions, a palliative nurse for their pride and a hostage negotiator for their egos.

I hated lateness. Being late is a selfish habit adopted by boring people in search of a personality quirk who can't be bothered to take up an instrument

The contents of supermarket baskets are surely evidence that none of us are coping with adulthood all that well.

Nostalgia: Greek compound combining nostos (homecoming) and álgos (pain). The literal Greek translation for nostalgia is "pain from an old wound.

(...) maybe that’s all love is. So much is how we perceive someone and the memories we have of them, rather than the facts of who they are. Maybe instead of saying I love you we should say I imagine you.

I would make a strong case for the argument that every adult on this earth is sitting on a bench waiting for their parents to pick them up, whether they know it or not. I think we wait until the day we die.

You have to take your chance, it’s not like you fall in love with someone every week. How arrogant are you, that you think you’re going to feel like this again about someone whenever you decide you’re ready, on your terms?

Do you think we’d ever be friends if we met now?” “No, I don’t think so.” “Me neither.” “Sort of magic, isn’t it? To know that we could meet the most exciting person in the world, but they’d never be able to recreate the history you and I have. What a unique superpower we have over each other.

It’s easier, being heartbroken in your thirties, because no matter how painful it is, you know it will pass. I don’t believe one other human has the power to ruin my life any more.

I’d noticed this was a thing that people did when they got into their thirties: they saw every personal decision you made as a direct judgement on their life.

I think something happens in your thirties where you slightly let go of this idea of the perfect career. I have so much fun outside of work, maybe it’s enough that it’s just fine. It pays okay, I get on with my colleagues. At the end of the day, it’s just ye olde day job.

I hadn’t realized quite how much of early-days dating was pretending to be unbothered, or busy, or not that hungry, or demonstratively ‘low-key’ about everything.

Men always have to keep a low flame burning for every ex. It will be flickering in there for him, even if he doesn’t know it is. Whereas women always have to extinguish it.

My solitude was like a gemstone. For the most part it was sparkling and resplendent – something I wore with pride. (...) But underneath this diamond of solitude was a sharp point that I occasionally caught with my bare hands, making it feel like a perilous asset rather than a precious one. Perhaps this jagged underside was essential – what made the surface of my aloneness shine so bright. But loneliness, once just sad, had recently started to feel frightening.

No one can stay young for ever, even when youth seems such an integral part of who they are. It’s such a simple rule of being human, and yet one I regularly found impossible to grasp. Everyone gets old.

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.

I’m fiscally conservative but socially liberal…’I’m not sure if I believe that really exists,’ I replied. ‘I know what you’re trying to say. But ‘I love the gays but don’t care about the poor’ can’t be described as liberal in any sense.

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.

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. Their girlfriend didn’t have to be human. They didn’t have to think about plans or practicalities, they weren’t burdened with the concern of another person’s happiness.

I liked feeling like I was a precious and valuable thing to be guarded, like a diamond necklace in transit with a security guard. Why was a sprinkling of the patriarchy so good when it came to dating?

Not for the first time upon looking in on my friends' long-term relationships, I marveled at how a marriage ironically seemed to provide men of my generations with even more of an excuse to not grow up.

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.

Men of our generation often disappear once they’ve got a woman to say ‘I love you’ back to them, because it’s almost like they’ve completed a game. Because they’re the first boys who grew up glued to their PlayStations and Game Boys, they weren’t conditioned to develop any sense of honour and duty in adolescence the way our fathers were. PlayStations replaced parenting. They were taught to look for fun, complete the fun, then get to the next level, switch players or try a new game. They need maximum stimulation all the time. ‘I love you’ is the relationship equivalent of Level 17 of Tomb Raider 2 for a lot of millennial men.

None of us would ever fully grasp the extent of our magnificent unoriginality -- it would be too painful to process...There was the evidence, in all these profiles, where who we really are and who we'd like everyone to think we are were in such unsubtle tension. How clear it suddenly was that we are all the same organs, tissue and liquids packaged up in one version of a million cliches, who all have insecurities and desires; the need to feel nutured, important, understood and useful in one way or another. Non of us are special. I don't know why we fight it so much.

I wanted him inside me so I could search for the ghosts inside him. In the absence of any context for who he was, I was gathering forensics from the inerasable fingerprints that had been left by those who had handled him.

loads of people think it, but everyone’s too scared to say it. And it’s not about feminism, and it’s not about men and women, it’s just a fact about life. Loads of people aren’t happy until they’re in a relationship. Happiness, for them, is being in a partnership.

Summer soon. Long days, long nights, light at all hours, illuminating everything. Nowhere to hide.

It's so hard to trace which memories are yours and which ones you've borrowed from photo albums and family folklore and appropriated as your own.

It is our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.” Marcel Proust

You can’t ‘delete’ a human you love. I’m not a picture on your phone,” I said, sitting back in my chair and rubbing my eyes with the heels of my palms.

I miss home.” I miss home. I miss home.

Jethro's flat was in a warehouse that, even from the outside, looked very pleased with its own conversion.

She was both the most tragically insecure and beguilingly confident person I had ever met. And she loved fun, which was infectious. Her pursuit of new experiences was a preoccupation, and her permanent state of being single had given her the time to make an ongoing project of her own life.

Getting older was an increasingly perplexing thing, but these moments – understanding that potential future memories were being taken from you year on year, like road closures – were the very worst of it.

I didn’t wear a bra, simply to show off that I don’t have to wear a bra, which is a paltry consolation for having such small breasts. But I didn’t mind any more – I had become mostly indifferent to my body.

Why was a sprinkling of the patriarchy so good when it came to dating? I resented it. It was like good sea salt—just a tiny dash could really bring out the flavour of the date and it was so often delectable.

Was it a game you wanted to complete? You met a woman who had her life together, and you wanted to see if you could pull it apart? You wanted to know that you could get her to fall in love with you, say all the things you wanted her to say, do all the things you wanted her to do, then the game was finished and you could turn it off?

But I think you might be right, I think I’ve created a version of him too. Or maybe that’s all love is. So much is how we perceive someone and the memories we have of them, rather than the facts of who they are. Maybe instead of saying I love you we should say I imagine you.

You know, every time you ‘change your mind’ in such an extreme way, it takes something from a woman. It’s an act of theft. It’s not just a theft of her trust, it’s a theft of her time. You’ve taken things from her, so you could have a fun few months. Can you not see how selfish that is?

Then I realized—he would be able to decide when he wanted to fall in love and have a family and it would happen. There would always be a woman who wanted to love him. He didn’t have to take this chance at all—he could wait for another chance. Then another one. The female population was just an endless source of chances and he could wait as long as he wanted. There was so little risk involved when it came to who and how he loved. Nothing meant anything to him.

He took off his denim jacket and draped it around my shoulders because I was cold. I could tell he was just as cold as I was, but I didn’t want to stop his big show of masculinity. How could I? I’d bought front-row tickets to it. I wondered how much of his behaviour this evening had been dictated by a pressure to perform his gender in such a demonstrative way. But then again, what was I doing? Why was I wearing a pair of four-inch heels that gave me blisters?

Because these men wanted to want something rather than have something. (...) 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. (...) 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. Their girlfriend didn’t have to be human. They didn’t have to think about plans or practicalities, they weren’t burdened with the concern of another person’s happiness. And they could be heroes. They could be gods.

Every heterosexual woman I know is emotionally paralysed in relationships by this fear of “scaring men off”. Then you have your Lucys of this world, these total anomalies, who know what they want and say: “I’m the boss, here are the rules, do as I say.” And so many men seem to love it. Like it’s a relief, or something.

I had never known a feeling as unbearable—as sour, wrenching and unshakeably sad—as pity for a parent.

Lola, what’s your love language?” Franny asked, her chin coyly resting in the palm of her hand. Lola shrugged. “I don’t know. Anal, probably.

Do the transgressions of the artist undermine the pleasure to be found in the art?

Nostalgia: Greek compound combining nostos (homecoming) and álgos (pain). The literal Greek translation for nostalgia is ‘pain from an old wound’.

But I think maybe every job is a waste of an English degree.

We finished was such a dishonest retelling of how we’d ended, implying consent and communication, but now was not the time to debate wording.

I think the memory of your childhood home is impossible to destroy.

had never known a feeling as unbearable—as sour, wrenching and unshakeably sad—as pity for a parent.

was curated and censored, enabled by an algorithm, determined by self-selection.

Mum was right, he didn't need these relics of mundanity, but I understood his inclination to hold on to them. I too had shoe boxes of cinema tickets from first dates with Joe and utility bills from flats I no longer lived in. I'd never known why they were important, but they were - they felt like proof of life lived, in case a time came when it was needed, like a driving license or a passport.

to get hold of Mum, walking through various indistinguishable zones with names of different colours, trying to find someone who might be able to help me. But there were no passing staff to help me because such

How did these women do it? What was their secret? What unexpected, mystical orifice on their body did they allow these men entry to that in turn made them do whatever unreasonable thing they wanted? Or was it that they simply told them what to do and when to do it, and the imposed restriction of choice made their boyfriends feel safely shepherded rather than ready for slaughter? Had I been treating men too much like adults and not enough like little directionless lambs?

I’m fiscally conservative but socially liberal,” he said within the first two minutes of me asking him about his job. I wouldn’t be surprised if right-leaning thirty-somethings received a script in the post to prepare them for social situations.

It’s like what Joe said in his groom’s speech: love is being the guardian of another person’s solitude. Maybe friendship is being the guardian of another person’s hope. Leave it with me and I’ll look after it for a while, if it feels too heavy for now.

He said he’d felt untethered in recent years – unsure of the sort of life that would make him happiest. He felt like he had to escape something, but he didn’t know what and he didn’t know where to go. I told him I thought that was the sensation commonly known as adulthood.

Fine, MyFace. All of those websites that make you obsess over ‘who you are’ and how to explain it to everyone. You don’t need to explain it to everyone all the time! In our day, ‘who you are’ was just the thing that happened when you got out of bed and got on with the day.

You met a woman who had her life together, and you wanted to see if you could pull it apart? You wanted to know that you could get her to fall in love with you, say all the things you wanted her to say, do all the things you wanted her to do, then the game was finished and you could turn it off?

I could never get on board with this sort of girl-gang feminism, the groups of female friends who called themselves things like ‘the coven’ on social media and exhibited moral superiority from simply having a weekly brunch with each other. Having friends doesn’t make you a feminist; going on about female friendship doesn’t make you a feminist.

She’d ask if I had a problem with her, or if I sensed awkwardness between us. She’d tell me how important I was to Joe and how special he thought I was. She would give me a series of hugs and repeatedly tell me that she hoped we’d be friends. We’d met at least five times, and she and Joe had been going out for over a year, yet she still believed there were declarations we had to make to each other in quiet corners of social situations. I had thought about why she did this a lot and, rather generously, had come to the conclusion that Lucy was a woman who’d watched too many structured reality TV shows. She evidently felt a party wasn’t a party until two women in peplum dresses clutched hands while one says: “After you slept with Ryan, I stopped liking you as a friend, but I will always love you like a sister.

He said he’d felt untethered in recent years—unsure of the sort of life that would make him happiest. He felt like he had to escape something, but he didn’t know what and he didn’t know where to go. I told him I thought that was the sensation commonly known as adulthood.

Do you think maybe…maybe… it could be a lie?” “Your birthdate? Could well be, actually. Could well be. I’ve heard of birth certificates being a few days out” “No, not my birth certificate - star signs.” “Oh.” Her eyes squinted slightly as she conjured this thought as a possibility.” “No.

Mate. Male conversational currency as widely effective as the euro.

We weren’t wrong,’ he said. ‘We were growing up.

The contents of supermarket baskets are surely evidence that none of us are coping with adulthood all that well.

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.

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.

Have a think. Have some conversations. Live some life, then come back to me.

Why was a sprinkling of the patriarchy so good when it came to dating?

He couldn’t work out which gave him greater freedom: earning enough money so he could disappear whenever he wanted, or earning no money and choosing a life of semi-permanent disappearance. He said he’d felt untethered in recent years—unsure of the sort of life that would make him happiest. He felt like he had to escape something, but he didn’t know what and he didn’t know where to go. I told him I thought that was the sensation commonly known as adulthood.

I’ve known I’ll be fine. It’s easier, being heartbroken in your thirties, because no matter how painful it is, you know it will pass. I don’t believe one other human has the power to ruin my life any more.

The only way I had managed to not think all day every day about my dad and his brain—his beautiful, big brain being unassembled and laid in front of him like flat-pack furniture—

It’s so hard to trace which memories are yours and which ones you’ve borrowed from photo albums and family folklore and appropriated as your own.

realized that while the future might strip him of his self, something mightier remained. His soul would always exist somewhere separate and safe. No one and nothing—no disease, no years of ageing—could take that away from him.

Lust,” Lola said knowingly. “It makes fools of us.

[…] the ephemeral period of a new relationship when everything domestic could be erotic. When watching someone pour milk on their cereal or towel-dry their hair was more entrancing than the ocean. When smelling their morning breath or unwashed scalp was exciting because it took you one step further into their high-walled palace of privacy, where you hoped only you were allowed to roam. Sexed-up to saturation point, therefore trying out the novelty of being humdrum. If this turned into a long-term relationship, one day we’d be only humdrum and we’d have to revisit the novelty of being sexy again — arranging ‘date nights’ and putting on our best clothes for each other and purposefully lighting candles. We trick ourselves into being close until we really are close, then we trick ourselves into seeming distant to stay as close as we can for as long as possible. (P. 97)

I thought about all these men in their thirties—ageing on the outside with receding hairlines and budding haemorrhoids—running around a nursery, picking up and putting down women and wives and babies from an overflowing trunk of toys.

There was so much I thought I’d known about Max, but now I questioned whether we had been perfect strangers in a pretence of togetherness. We had first met as five photos and a few words about our respective hobbies, jobs and location. Our meet-cute of Linx profiles was anything but spontaneous—it was curated and censored, enabled by an algorithm, determined by self-selection. We’d read the signage of each other and we’d filled in the rest with our imaginations.

Classic sign of someone who doesn’t enjoy sex that much, if they own massage oils.

think it’s because of all his reading,’ I said. ‘He’s spent his life immersing himself in other worlds – conjuring images from what he’s read on the page. I’m sure that must have given him a wealth of stories for his mind to draw on.

Kai tau sudaužo širdį perkopus trisdešimt, būna lengviau, nes, kad ir kaip skaudu būtų, suvoki, jog tai praeis. Nebetikiu, kad vienas žmogus turi galios sužlugdyti mano gyvenimą.

Meilė – tai namų ilgesys. Meilės paieškos suaugus – tai paprasčiausiai mamų ir tėčių ilgesio išraiška; intymumo ir romantikos ieškome todėl, kad mums visada reikia tėvų teikiamo saugumo ir dėmesio. Tiesiog ieškome to kitur. Mano tėčiui beveik aštuoniasdešimt ir jis vis dar ilgisi motinos. Visą gyvenimą mokėjo tai slėpti, bet dabar, kai jam nežinant pamažu byra savitvardos fasadas, išaiškėjo tiesa. Jam reikia tik mamos. Galėčiau ginčytis, kad visi šio pasaulio suaugusieji, net jei to nežino, sėdi ant suoliuko ir laukia, kol tėvai ateis jų pasiimti. Man atrodo, mes visi to laukiame iki pat paskutinės dienos.

Muito do amor que sentimos por uma pessoa depende do vasto arquivo de memórias partilhadas a que acedemos só por olhar para o seu rosto ou ouvir-lhe a voz.

My dad who could instantly recognize me – not the face of me, but everything of who I was – in a nanosecond: the name of my childhood imaginary friend, my dissertation subject, my favourite character from my favourite book and the road names of everywhere I’ve ever lived. When I looked at his face now, I mostly saw my dad, but I sometimes saw something else in his eyes that unsettled me – sometimes it looked like everything he understood had been cut into pieces and he was trying to configure them into a collage that made sense.

How clear it suddenly was that we are all the same organs, tissue and liquids packaged up in one version of a million clichés, who all have insecurities and desires; the need to feel nurtured, important, understood and useful in one way or another. None of us are special. I don’t know why we fight it so much.

Nostalgia: Greek compound combining

Can we please ban the phrase ‘what he’s missing,’ ” I said. “I’d like to issue a house-style guide for talking about being single, and ‘what he’s missing’ is strictly forbidden.

The female population was just an endless source of chances and he could wait as long as he wanted. There was so little risk involved when it came to who and how he loved. Nothing meant anything to him.

I showed Lola Max’s profile and she eagerly said she’d “seen him on there,” which I didn’t love. I had thought of these men as offerings from Mother Destiny—hand-selected possible partners, chosen especially for me (“It’s not cock couture,” Lola said).

I took a big gulp of prosecco and held my breath, but it made no difference—when would I be allowed to stop drinking this thin, sour, fruity venom of terrible parties and terrible conversation?

Katherine always made me feel like I was taking part in a competition I couldn’t remember entering.

Max often disarmed me in seemingly unromantic conversation with these grand, surprising statements about our relationship. It felt like a test. I never knew the correct way to respond.

Monthaversary dinner. How did these women do it? What was their secret?... Was it that they simply told them what to do and when to do it, and the imposed restriction of choice made their boyfriends feel safely shepherded rather than ready for slaughter? Had I been treating men too much like adults and not enough like little directionless lambs?

What would it be like, I wondered, to be seen through such adoring eyes, that they could not only capture you in a painting, but rearrange you to further exhibit who you were?

There was so much I thought I’d known about Max, but now I questioned whether we had been perfect strangers in a pretence of togetherness. (...) Had I created kismet from coincidental (...)? Had I applied more soul to him than he possessed (...)? Had I trusted him too quickly and fallen too deeply, because I’d projected my own version of his personality into the holes of my knowledge of him?

Lola—a girl so outwardly preoccupied with wokeness; who only read overhyped memoirs written by women under thirty having feeble epiphanies about themselves; who had “she/her” written in all her social media bios despite very clearly never being in danger of being misgendered—