Book Lovers Emily Henry Quotes

Is there anything better than iced coffee and a bookstore on a sunny day? I mean, aside from hot coffee and a bookstore on a rainy day.

Nora.” He just barely smiles. “You’re in books. Of course you don’t have a life. None of us do. There’s always something too good to read.

The last-page ache. The deep breath in after you’ve set the book aside.

Sometimes, even when you start with the last page and you think you know everything, a book finds a way to surprise you.

If I had to pick one person to be in my corner, it’d be you. Every time.

That’s the thing about women. There’s no good way to be one. Wear your emotions on your sleeve and you’re hysterical. Keep them tucked away where your boyfriend doesn’t have to tend to them and you’re a heartless bitch.

So if you’re the ‘wrong kind of woman,’ then I’m the wrong kind of man.

She wonders whether what comes next could ever live up to the expectations. She doesn’t know. You never can. She turns the page anyway.

Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either. Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt. No matter where we go, our love will stretch out to hold us, and that makes me feel like … like everything will be okay.

Those were the endings I found solace in. The ones that said, Yes, you have lost something, but maybe, someday, you’ll find something too.

That’s life. You’re always making decisions, taking paths that lead you away from the rest before you can see where they end. Maybe that’s why we as a species love stories so much. All those chances for do-overs, opportunities to live the lives we’ll never have.

For anyone who wants it all,” she begins, “may you find something that is more than enough.

Maybe it’s possible to have more than one home. Maybe it’s possible to belong in a hundred different ways to a hundred different people and places.

Just because not everyone gets you doesn't mean you're wrong.

I read once that sunflowers always orient themselves to face the sun. That’s what being near Charlie Lastra is like for me. There could be a raging wildfire racing toward me from the west and I’d still be straining eastward toward his warmth.

I know,” he says. “I can read you like a book.

A reminder that there are things in life so valuable that you must risk the pain of losing them for the joy of briefly having them.

Some books you don’t read so much as live, and finishing one of those always makes me think of ascending from a scuba dive. Like if I surface too fast I might get the bends.

Because nothing—not the beautiful and not the terrible—lasts.

You fucking undo me.

A good bookstore,” Charlie says, “is like an airport where you don’t have to take your shoes off.

that’s what made me fall in love with reading: the instant floating sensation, the dissolution of real-world problems, every worry suddenly safely on the other side of some metaphysical surface.

Not every decision a woman makes is some grand indictment on other women’s lives.

All those years spent thinking that I had superhuman self-control, and now I realize I just never put anything I wanted too badly in front of myself.

Life in New York was like being in a giant bookstore: all these trillions of paths and possibilities drawing dreamers into the city's beating heart, saying, I make no promises but I offer many doors.

You’re a fighter,” he says. “When you care about something, you won’t let anything fucking touch it. I’ve never met anyone who cares as much as you do. Do you know what most people would give to have someone like that in their life?

I used to think it was because people like me don’t get those endings. And asking for it, hoping for it, is a way to lose something you’ve never even had.

Of course I have a checklist." His eyes glint in the dark. "What am I, an animal?

His hands root me through the floor, the room stilling. “Sorry. I just needed …” His eyes search mine, thumbs still sweeping in that gentle rhythm. “A nap?” he teases softly, tentatively. “A fantasy novel? A competitively fast oil change?” The block of ice in my chest cracks. “How do you do that?” His brow furrows. “Do what?” “Say the right thing.” The corner of his mouth quirks. “No one thinks that.” “I do.” His lashes splay across his cheeks as his gaze drops. “Maybe I just say the right thing for you.

Does anyone ever want to finish a good book?

I’m a grown man, Nora. I can buy my own Bigfoot erotica, thank you very much.

I think,” I whisper, “you’re one of the least disappointing people I’ve ever met.

The only two ways I've ever managed to get out of my head are through reading and rigorous exercise.

I'm not ashamed of my upbringing, but the more you tell a person about yourself, the more power you hand over.

The ones that speak to me are those whose final pages admit there is no going back. That every good thing must end. That every bad thing does too, that everything does.

Another “universal truth” Austen could’ve started Pride and Prejudice with: When you tell yourself not to think about something, it will be all that you can think about.

Even if it hurts, when he shimmers across my mind, it’s like remembering a favorite book. One that left you gutted, sure, but also one that changed you forever

So all I can do is cry with her. Somehow, it never occurred to me that this was an option: that two people, in the same hug, could both be allowed to fall apart. That maybe it’s neither of our jobs to keep a steel spine. That we can both survive this pain without the other shouldering it.

As he watches me, he murmurs, “I’ve just always wanted to see a shark attack up close. So much blood.

I still feel like a city person, through and through, but maybe it’s possible to have more than one home. Maybe it’s possible to belong in a hundred different ways to a hundred different people and places.

There are things in life so valuable that you must risk the pain of losing them for the joy of briefly having them.

Until you got here,” he rasps, “all this place had ever been was a reminder of the ways I was a disappointment, and now you’re here, and—I don’t know. I feel like I’m okay. So if you’re the ‘wrong kind of woman,’ then I’m the wrong kind of man.” I can see all of the shades of him at once. Quiet, unfocused boy. Precocious, resentful preteen. Broody high schooler desperate to get out. Sharp-edged man trying to fit himself back into a place he never belonged to begin with. That’s the thing about being an adult standing beside your childhood race car bed. Time collapses, and instead of the version of you you’ve built from scratch, you’re all the hackneyed drafts that came before, all at once.

Charlie threads his fingers through mine and lifts the back of my hand to his lips. “For what it’s worth,” he says, “I doubt I will ever like anyone else in the world as much as I like you.

Just because not everyone gets you doesn’t mean you’re wrong. You’re someone people can count on. Really count on. And that doesn’t make you cold or boring.

Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either.

His golden-brown eyes slowly rise. "If it isn't the woman who 'isn't stalking me'." I grind out, "If it isn't the man who 'didn't try to ravish me in the middle of a hurricane'.

I’ve always considered myself an introvert, but the truth is I’m used to having people on all sides of me. You adapt to living life with a constant audience. It becomes comforting.

I know you’re working.” My voice comes out throttled. “I just wanted to be somewhere . . .” Safe? Familiar? Comfortable? “Near you.

Maybe it's possible to belong in a hundred different ways to a hundred different people and places.

I didn't know it was possible to miss a person this much while she was sitting right next to you, so badly everything in you aches.

You can take the city person out of the city, but the city will always be in them. I think it’s the same for sisters. Anywhere we go, we won’t leave each other. We couldn’t even if we wanted to. And we don’t. We never will.

I’ll take you home whenever you want,” he says. “But if you want to stay, and you wake up screaming, it’s okay. I’ll make sure you’re okay. And if you want to stay, and then change your mind, I don’t mind driving you back at four a.m.” I read once that not everyone thinks in words. I was shocked, imagining these other people who don’t use language to make sense of everyone and everything, who don’t automatically organize the world into chapters, pages, sentences. Looking into Charlie’s face, I understand it. The way a crush of feeling and feathery impressions can move through your body, bypassing your mind. How a person can know there’s something worth saying but have no concept of what exactly that is. I’m not thinking in words.

Feeling that hole in your heart is better than feeling nothing at all.

There are full series I love whose last chapter I’ve never read. I hate the feeling of something ending.

You do have me, Nora. I never stood a chance.

Mom’s theory was that youthful skin would make a woman more money (true in both acting and waitressing), good underwear would make her more confident (so far, so true), and good books would make her happy (universal truth), and we’ve clearly both packed with this theory in mind.

There’s still no happy ending for a woman who wants it all, the kind who lies awake aching with furious hunger, unspent ambition making her bones rattle in her body.

This, I think, is what it is to dream, and I finally understand why Mom could never give it up, why my authors can’t give it up, and I’m happy for them, because this wanting, it feels good, like a bruise you need to press on, a reminder that there are things in life so valuable that you must risk the pain of losing them for the joy of briefly having them.

Charlie threads his fingers through mine and lifts the back of my hand to his lips. “For what it’s worth,” he says, “I doubt I will ever like anyone else in the world as much as I like you.” I slip my arms around his neck and climb into his lap, kissing his temples, his jaw, his mouth. Love, I think, a tremor in my hands as they move into his hair, as he kisses me. The last-page ache. The deep breath in after you’ve set the book aside. When he walks me to the door sometime later, he takes my face in his hands and says, “You, Nora Stephens, will always be okay.

Why is my mother texting me about how hot you are?

No matter where we go, our love will stretch out to hold us, and that makes me feel like . . . like everything will be okay.

There isn’t for women either. There’s just tall women,” he says, “and the men too insecure to date them.

You have no idea how badly I wish I could be enough.

Stephens, if you're the villain in someone else's love story, then I'm the devil.

I watched my friends in relationships compromise after compromise, shrinking into themselves until they were nothing but a piece of a whole, until all their stories came from the past, and their career aspirations, their friends, and their apartments were replaced by our aspirations, our friends, our apartment. Half lives that could be taken from them without any warning.

Hidden there, under my rigidly manufactured sense of control and my checklists and my steel exterior, there is always fear.

I just... I'm not stalking you." His eyebrows furrow. "Okay?" "I'm not." "More convincing every time you say it.

Do you send all your enemies Bigfoot erotica, or just the special ones?

Maybe this is why people take trips, for that feeling of your real life liquefying around you, like nothing you do will tug on any other strand of your carefully built world. It's a feeling not unlike reading a really good book: all-consuming, worry-obliterating.

I wonder if I’ve been living at half volume too. With agenting. With dating. Tamping myself into a shape that felt sturdy and safe instead of right.

Time collapses, and instead of the version of you you’ve built from scratch, you’re all the hackneyed drafts that came before, all at once.

My mom’s approach was to kill them with kindness, and it worked. She won the whole fucking town over. But I couldn’t do it. I can’t make small talk with people I know hate me. I can’t play nice with people I think are assholes.

I had no idea it was possible,” he says, “for you to want me as much as I want you.

For a decade, I've known I will never again have everything, and so all I've wanted is to believe that, someday, again, I'll have enough.

I’m always a fan of the truth,” he says. “No one’s always a fan of the truth,” I say. “Sometimes the truth sucks.” “It’s always better to have the truth up front than to be misled.

I already told you, Nora,” he murmurs, his fingers splaying on my stomach, just beneath my shirt. “I’ll go anywhere with you.

I gave myself three years," I tell Charlie , "and a dollar amount I'd need to make, and if I didn't reach it, I promised I'd quit and look for something salaried." "How early did you make your deadline?" I feel my smile curve involuntarily. "Eight months." His lips curve too. Smiling with knives. "Of course you did," he murmurs. Our eyes lock for a beat.

All this time, deep in the pit of my stomach, the shadowy monster of grief and fear and anger has been in the corner where I locked it, but it’s been growing, new ropes of angry black lashing out in every direction, starving, mad with hunger. A demon that’s going to devour me from the inside out.

I feel like I’m sugar under a blowtorch, like he’s caramelizing my blood.

It's okay,' he whispers, rocking me back and forth. 'You're not alone,' he promises, and beneath it I hear the unsaid rest: I'm here.

Remember when you used to pretend to be polite?” “Do you miss it?” “Not at all.

This is why crushes are terrible. You go from feeling like life is a flat path one needs only to cruise over to spending every second on an incline, or caught in a weightless, stomach-in-your-throat drop.

Nora Stephens,” he says, “I’ve racked my brain and this is the best I can come up with, so I really hope you like it.” His gaze lifts, everything about it, about his face, about his posture, about him made up of sharp edges and jagged bits and shadows, all of it familiar, all of it perfect. Not for someone else, maybe, but for me. “I move back to New York,” he says. “I get another editing job, or maybe take up agenting, or try writing again. You work your way up at Loggia, and we’re both busy all the time, and down in Sunshine Falls, Libby runs the local business she saved, and my parents spoil your nieces like the grandkids they so desperately want, and Brendan probably doesn’t get much better at fishing, but he gets to relax and even take paid vacations with your sister and their kids. And you and I—we go out to dinner. “Wherever you want, whenever you want. We have a lot of fun being city people, and we’re happy. You let me love you as much as I know I can, for as long as I know I can, and you have it fucking all. That’s it. That’s the best I could come up with, and I really fucking hope you say—” I kiss him then, like there isn’t someone reading one of the Bridgerton novels five feet away, like we’ve just found each other on a deserted island after months apart. My hands in his hair, my tongue catching on his teeth, his palms sliding around behind me and squeezing me to him in the most thoroughly public groping we’ve managed yet. “I love you, Nora,” he says when we pull apart a few inches to breathe. “I think I love everything about you.

Somehow, it never occurred to me that this was an option: that two people, in the same hug, could both be allowed to fall apart. That maybe it’s neither of our jobs to keep a steel spine.

It’s never taken effort—that’s what made me fall in love with reading: the instant floating sensation, the dissolution of real-world problems, every worry suddenly safely on the other side of some metaphysical surface.

That is what I'm looking for every time I flip to the back of a book, compulsively checking for proof that in a life where so many things have gone wrong, there can be beauty too. That there is always hope, no matter what.

I love you, Nora,” he says when we pull apart a few inches to breathe. “I think I love everything about you.” “Even my Peloton?” I ask. “Great piece of equipment,” he says. “The fact that I check my email after work hours?” “Just makes it easier to share Bigfoot erotica without having to walk across the room,” he says. “Sometimes I wear very impractical shoes,” I add. “Nothing impractical about looking hot,” he says. “And what about my bloodlust?” His eyes go heavy as he smiles. “That,” he says, “might be my favorite thing. Be my shark, Stephens.” “Already was,” I say. “Always have been.” “I love you,” he says again. “I love you too.” I don’t have to force it past a knot or through the vise of a tight throat. It’s simply the truth, and it breathes out of me, a wisp of smoke, a sigh, another floating blossom on a current carrying billions of them. “I know,” he says. “I can read you like a book.

I'd take a swift beheading over that death by a thousand paper cuts, every time.

I burst out laughing, and the corner of his mouth ticks. Oh shit. It IS a smile. He's pleased to have made me laugh.

I’m just surprised how far you’re taking this small-town-transformation thing. And just so you know, those bangs do not make you more approachable. You just look like a hot assassin in an expensive wig.” “All I just heard,” I say, “is hot and expensive.

Got distracted by two gin martinis and a platinum blond shark who wanted me dead." "Not dead. Lightly mauled, maybe, but I would've stayed away from your face." "Didn't realize you were such a fan.

When we finally do this, Nora,” he says, straightening away from me, his hands slipping my buttons back into buttonholes as easily as he undid them, “it’s not going to be on a library table, and it’s not going to be on a time crunch.” He smooths my hair, tucks my blouse back into my skirt, then takes my hips in his hands and guides me off the table, catching me against him. “We’re going to do this right. No shortcuts.

Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt. No matter where we go, our love will stretch out to hold us, and that makes me feel like . . . like everything will be okay.

Look,” he says, “whenever I’m here, it feels like the walls are closing in on me. I love my family, I do. But I’ve spent fifteen years coming home as rarely as possible because it’s fucking lonely to feel like you don’t fit somewhere. I never wanted to run this store. I never wanted this town. And whenever I’m here it’s all I think about. I get so fucking claustrophobic from it all. “Not from them. But from feeling like I don’t know how to be myself here. From—getting in my head about who I’m supposed to be, or all the ways I haven’t turned out how they wanted me to. And then you showed up.” His eyes flare, flashlights racing over the dark, searching. “And I could finally breathe.

What's wrong with being in control anyway?" I demand, of the universe at large. "Beats me." "And what, just because I don't want kids, I would supposedly punish a pregnant woman for making a different decision than me? My favorite person's a pregnant woman! And I'm obsessed with my nieces. Not every decision a woman makes is some grand indictment on other women's lives." "Nora," Charlie says. "It's a novel. Fiction." "You don't get it because you're... you." I wave a hand at him. "Me?" he says. "You can afford to be all surly and sharp and people will admire you for it. The rules are different for women. You have to strike that perfect balance to be taken seriously but not seen as bitchy. It's a constant effort. People don't want to work with sharky women -" "I do," he says.

Because you’re smart and intuitive. And good at getting the best writing out of people, and you put the work before your ego. You know when to push and when to let something go. You’re trustworthy—partly because you’re so bad at lying—and you take care of the things that matter to you. “If I had to pick one person to be in my corner, it’d be you. Every time. You take care of shit.

The ragged edge of his voice knocks the wind out of me. I fight the impulse to rein in my shock, and then it all clicks, the bits of Charlie I’ve been collecting like puzzle pieces becoming a full picture. Not the Darcy trope. Not the self-important, dour academic I met for one very unpleasant lunch. A man who craves complete honesty, the realist who doesn’t always understand when he’s not seeing realism. Charlie, who wants to understand the world but has learned not to trust it.

In my favorite books, it’s never quite the ending I want. There’s always a price to be paid. Mom and Libby liked the love stories where everything turned out perfectly, wrapped in a bow, and I’ve always wondered why I gravitate toward something else. I used to think it was because people like me don’t get those endings. And asking for it, hoping for it, is a way to lose something you’ve never even had. The ones that speak to me are those whose final pages admit there is no going back. That every good thing must end. That every bad thing does too, that everything does. That is what I’m looking for every time I flip to the back of a book, compulsively checking for proof that in a life where so many things have gone wrong, there can be beauty too. That there is always hope, no matter what. After losing Mom, those were the endings I found solace in. The ones that said, Yes, you have lost something, but maybe, someday, you’ll find something too. For a decade, I’ve known I will never again have everything, and so all I’ve wanted is to believe that, someday, again, I’ll have enough. The ache won’t always be so bad. People like me aren’t broken beyond repair. No ice ever freezes too thick to thaw and no thorns ever grow too dense to be cut away. This book has crushed me with its weight and dazzled me with its tiny bright spots. Some books you don’t read so much as live, and finishing one of those always makes me think of ascending from a scuba dive. Like if I surface too fast I might get the bends.

I hated being a kid.” He folds his arm beneath his head and looks almost furtively in my direction. “I’d have no idea how to get someone else through it, and I definitely wouldn’t enjoy it. I like them, but I don’t want to be responsible for any.” “Agreed,” I say. “I love my nieces more than anything on the planet, but every time Tala falls asleep in my lap, her dad gets all teary-eyed and is like, Doesn’t it just make you want to have some of your own, Nora? But when you have kids, they count on you. Forever. Any mistake you make, any failure—and if something happens to you . . .” My throat twists. “People like to remember childhood as all magic and no responsibilities, but that’s not really how it is. You have absolutely no control over your environment. It all comes down to the adults in your life, and . . . I don’t know. Every time Libby has a new kid, it’s like there’s this magic house in my heart that rearranges to make a new room for the baby. “And it always hurts. It’s terrifying. One more person who needs you.

You know what I think?” Touching him feels so good, so strangely uncomplicated, like he’s the exception to every rule. “What?” “I think you love your job,” he says softly. “I think you work that hard because you care ten times more than the average person.” “About work,” I say. “About everything.” His arms tighten around me. “Your sister. Your clients. Their books. You don’t do anything you’re not going to do one hundred percent. You don’t start anything you can’t finish. “You’re not the person who buys the stationary bike as part of a New Year’s resolution, then uses it as a coatrack for three years. You’re not the kind of woman who only works hard when it feels good, or only shows up when it’s convenient. If someone insults one of your clients, those fancy kid gloves of yours come off, and you carry your own pen at all times, because if you’re going to have to write anything, it might as well look good. You read the last page of books first—don’t make that face, Stephens.” He cracks a smile in one corner of his mouth. “I’ve seen you—even when you’re shelving, you sometimes check the last page, like you’re constantly looking for all the information, trying to make the absolute best decisions.” “And by you’ve seen me,” I say, “you mean you’ve watched me.” “Of course I fucking do,” he says in a low, rough voice. “I can’t stop. I’m always aware of where you are, even if I don’t look, but it’s impossible not to. I want to see your face get stern when you’re emailing a client’s editor, being a hard-ass, and I want to see your legs when you’re so excited about something you just read that you can’t stop crossing and uncrossing them. And when someone pisses you off, you get these red splotches.” His fingers brush my throat. “Right here.” “You’re a fighter,” he says. “When you care about something, you won’t let anything fucking touch it. I’ve never met anyone who cares as much as you do. Do you know what most people would give to have someone like that in their life?” His eyes are dark, probing, his heartbeat fast. “Do you know how fucking lucky anyone you care about is? You know . . .