Ghosts 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.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“The contents of supermarket baskets are surely evidence that none of us are coping with adulthood all that well.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“(...) 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.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“Nostalgia: Greek compound combining nostos (homecoming) and álgos (pain). The literal Greek translation for nostalgia is "pain from an old wound.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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?”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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.”
― 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

“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.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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.”
― 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

“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.”
― 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

“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.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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?”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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?”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“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.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts