Emily Henry Quotes

When I watch you sleep," he said shakily, "I feel overwhelmed that you exist.

I’ve never met someone who is so perfectly my favorite person.

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.

I don't think I knew I was lonely until I met you.

I still have a lot to figure out, but the one thing I know is, wherever you are, that’s where I belong. I’ll never belong anywhere like I belong with you.

No," he says quietly. "In every universe, it's you for me. Even if it's not me for you.

He fit so perfectly in the love story I'd imagined for myself that I mistook him for the love of my life.

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

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.

And that was the moment I realized: when the world felt dark and scary, love could whisk you off to go dancing; laughter could take some of the pain away; beauty could punch holes in your fear. I decided then that my life would be full of all three.

If you think the story has a sad ending, it's because it's not over yet.

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

That’s the key to marriage. You have to keep falling in love with every new version of each other, and it’s the best feeling in the whole world.

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.

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

It hurts to want it all, so many things that can't coexist within the same life.

That was what I'd always loved about reading, what had driven me to write in the first place. That feeling that a new world was being spun like a spiderweb around you and you couldn't move until the whole thing had revealed itself to you.

But most of us are too scared to even ask what we want, in case we can't have it.

Sometimes it feels like I didn't even exist before that. Like you invented me.

My best friends taught me a new kind of quiet, the peaceful stillness of knowing one another so well you don’t need to fill the space. And a new kind of loud: noise as a celebration, as the overflow of joy at being alive, here, now.

You are in all of my happiest places.

I love him so much. I love him more than I did yesterday, and I already know tomorrow I'll love him even more, because every piece of him he gives me is another to fall in love with.

Sometimes life is very hard. Sometimes it demands so much of you that you start losing pieces of yourself as you stretch out to give what the world wants to take.

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

Love means constantly saying you're sorry, and then doing better.

I wish I could bottle this moment and wear it as a perfume. It would always be with me. Everywhere I went, he’d be there too, and so I’d always feel like myself.

Again and again he told me I wasn't myself. But he was wrong. I was the same me I'd always been. I'd just stopped trying to glow in the dark for him, or anyone else.

Maybe things can always get better between people who want to do a good job loving each other. Maybe that’s all it takes.

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.

Like even when something beautiful breaks, the making of it still matters.

People were complicated. They weren't math problems; they were collections of feelings and decisions and dumb luck.

You can't force a person to show up, but you can learn a lesson when they don't

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.

It’s fascinating. How so much of love is about who you are with someone.

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.

Falling's the part that takes your breath away. It's the part when you can't believe the person standing in front of you both exists and happened to wander into your path. It's supposed to make you feel lucky to be alive, exactly when and where you are.

I’m a cynic. And a cynic is a romantic who’s too scared to hope.

Things change, but we stretch and grow and make room for one another. Our love is a place we can always come back to, and it will be waiting, the same as it ever was. You belong here.

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.

Trust people's actions, not their words. Don't love anyone who isn't ready to love you back. Let go of the people who don't hold on to you. Don't wait on anyone who's in no rush to get to you.

Bad things don't dig down through your life until the pit's so deep that nothing good will ever be big enough to make you happy again. No matter how much shit, there will always be wildflowers.

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.

The same universe that dispassionately takes things away can bring you things you weren't imaginative enough to dream up.

You know that feeling, when you're watching someone sleep and you feel overwhelmed with joy that they exist?

Like a good book or an incredible outfit, being on vacation transports you into another version of yourself.

I want my life to be like-like making pottery. I want to enjoy it while it's happening, not just for where it might get me eventually.

I understood then, the immense honor it is to hurt like she does. To have loved someone so much that the taste of maple syrup can make you cry and laugh at the same time.

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

When you love someone,” he said haltingly, “. . . you want to make this world look different for them. To give all the ugly stuff meaning, and amplify the good. That’s what you do. For your readers. For me. You make beautiful things, because you love the world, and maybe the world doesn’t always look how it does in your books, but . . . I think putting them out there, that changes the world a little bit. And the world can’t afford to lose that.

I always like that thought, the way two people really did seem to grow into one. Or at least two overlapping parts, trees with tangled roots.

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.

For January, I don't care how the story ends as long as I spend it with you.

It’s not your job to make me happy, okay? You can’t make anyone happy. I’m happy just because you exist, and that’s as much of my happiness as you have control over.

All those moments throughout the days, weeks, months that don't get marked on calendars with hand-drawn stars or little stickers. Those are the moments that make a life. Not grand gestures, but mundane details that, over time, accumulate until you have a home, instead of a house. The things that matter. The things I can't stop longing for.

Happy. Not giddy or overjoyed, but that low, steady level of happiness that, in the best periods of life, rides underneath everything else, a buffer between you and the world you are walking over.

You're like gravity. Everything keeps spinning, but my mind's always got one hand on you.

Love, after all, was often made not of shiny things but practical ones. Ones that grew old and rusted only to be repaired and polished.

It’s a library, Daphne. If you can’t be a human here, where can you?

I'm on vacation. Vacations always end. It's the very fact that it's finite that makes traveling special. You could move to any one of those destinations you loved in small doses, and it wouldn't be the spellbinding, life-altering seven days you spend there as a guest, letting a place into your heart fully, letting it change you.

Because I know you, he says tenderly, "and I remember what you sound like when you like something.

I’m afraid of loving you for our entire lives, and then having to say goodbye.

I've always felt like once someone sees me deep down, that's it. There's something ugly in there, or unlovable, and you're the only person who's ever made me feel like I'm okay.

Life’s short enough without us talking ourselves out of hope and trying to dodge every bad feeling. Sometimes you have to push through the discomfort, instead of running.

Love is giving the world away, and being loved is having the whole world to give.

If you swapped out all my Jessicas for Johns, do you know what you'd get? Fiction. Just fiction. Ready and willing to be read by anyone, but somehow by being a woman who writes about women, I've eliminated half the Earth's population from my potential readers, and you know what? I don't feel ashamed of that. I feel pissed.

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.

He’s a golden boy. I’m a girl whose life has been drawn in shades of gray.

That is how life feels too often. Like you're doing everything you can to survive only to be sabotaged by something beyond your control, maybe even some darker part of yourself.

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

They all do, I think. You are in all of my happiest places. You are where my mind goes when it needs to be soothed.

Here's the thing about writing Happily Ever Afters: it helps if you believe in them.

It’s easy to be loved by the ones who’ve never seen you fuck up. The ones you’ve never had to apologize to, and who still think all your ‘quirks’ are charming.

You fucking undo me.

I thought - think it's brave to believe in love. I mean, the lasting kind. To try for that, even knowing it can hurt you.

And that's how it is in real life too. You can love someone and still know the future you'd have with them wouldn't work for you, or for them, or maybe even for both of you.

How many universes do you think we’re together in?” “Higher than either of us can count.

Dammit, R.E.M. was right: Every single person on the planet had to take turns hurting. Sometimes all you could do was hold on to each other right until the dark spat you back out.

Want is a kind of thief. It’s a door in your heart, and once you know it’s there, you’ll spend your life longing for whatever’s behind it.

Hate, I found out on the ride home, was a less embarrassing way to say fear.

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

There doesn’t need to be a winner and a loser. You just have to care how the other person feels. You have to care more about them than you do about being right.

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.

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

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.

There aren't words vast or specific enough to capture the ecstasy and the ache and love and fear I feel just looking at him now.

That crush of happiness, that feeling that this is what life’s about: being somewhere beautiful, with someone you love.

He's become my best friend the way the others did. Bit by bit, sand passing through an hour glass so slowly, it's impossible to pin down the moment it happens. When suddenly, more of my heart belongs to him than doesn't, and I know I'll never get a single grain back.

You make the people you care about feel like … He pauses. Like you want all of them. Not just the good parts. And that’s terrifying to someone who’s spent a lifetime avoiding those other pieces of themselves.

I know feeling small gets to some people, . . . but I kind of like it. Takes the pressure off when you’re just one life of six billion at any given moment. And when you’re going through something hard . . . it’s nice to know you’re not even close to the only one.

When I think about you, January, and I think about doing laundry with you and trying terrible green juice cleanses and going to antiques malls with you, I only feel happy. The world looks different than I ever thought it could be, and I don’t want to look for what’s broken or what could go wrong. I don’t want to brace myself for the worst and miss out on being with you.

Tomorrow we will love each other a little more, and the next day, and the next day. And even on those days when one or both of us is having a hard time, we’ll be here, where we are completely known, completely accepted, by the person whose every side we love wholeheartedly. I’m here with all the versions of him I’ve met over twelve years of vacations, and even if the point of life isn’t just being happy, right now, I am. Down to the bones.

I want to be the one who gives you what you deserve, and I want to sleep next to you every night and to be the one you complain about book stuff to, and I don’t think I ever could deserve any of that, and I know this thing between us isn’t a sure thing, but that’s what I want to aim for with you. Because I know no matter how long I get to love you, it will be worth whatever comes after.

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.

I imagined them all thinking it was worth it. Telling me how much they loved me. All my life, when I thought of my future, that was what I pictured. Not a career. The things I thought would come with it. Happiness, love, safety. And that dream had been enough for a long time. What was school if not a chance to earn your worth? To prove, again and again, that you were measurably good. One more deal I struck with a disinterested universe: If I'm good enough, I'll be happy. I'll be loved. I'll be safe.

Suddenly we’re not kids anymore, and it feels like it happened overnight, so fast I didn’t have time to notice, to let go of everything that used to matter so much, to see that the old wounds that once felt like gut-level lacerations have faded to small white scars, mixed in among the stretch marks and sunspots and little divots where time has grazed against my body. I’ve put so much time and distance between myself and that lonely girl, and what does it matter? Here is a piece of my past, right in front of me, miles away from home. You can’t outrun yourself. Not your history, not your fears, not the parts of yourself you’re worried are wrong.

I thought you didn’t like holding hands,” I say. “And you said you did,” he says. “So, what? I just get whatever I want now?” I tease. His smile flickers back into place, calm and restrained. “Yes, Poppy,” he says. “You get whatever you want now. Is that a problem?” “What if I want you to have what you want?” He arches an eyebrow. “Are you just saying that because you know what I’m going to say, and you want to make fun of me for it?” “No?” I say. “Why? What are you going to say?” Our hands go still between us. “I have what I want, Poppy.

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.