Paula

“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

“...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

“The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love.”
― Parker J. Palmer

“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