Emily Henry Quotes

I hear him in the creak and groan of the floorboards as the summer nights stretch them, can visualize him sitting at the foot of my bed, saying, Other houses have support beams and foundations. Ours has bones and a heartbeat. I

It's not about what's happened. It's about how you cope with things, who you are. You've always been this fierce fucking light, and even when you're at your worst, when you feel angry and broken, you still know how to be a person. How to tell people you- you love them.

I was just a moment, and you gave me a million Junes.
I was just a moment, and you made me forever.

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

Mom would hate it if she knew I told Coco this stuff. She'd hate it, and she wouldn't even admit that to me, because she'd be too worried about making me uncomfortable or ashamed. She's like a silverware divider with a conscience, trying to keep us all separate and safe without making the forks feel bad about not being spoons or the spoons feel worried that the forks shouldn't be so poky.

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.

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.

So tell me, okay? Tell me what you need, and tell me every single time you need it, and I'll be there.

He wants to have your glorious, blue-eyed babies," I whisper.
"So as long as no one tells him he doesn't have a uterus, I have a chance?" she murmurs back.

I think right then he could've told me he was the one who spread out the stars and I would have been neither surprised nor any more impressed than I already was.

She may be a bitch, but she's a genuine bitch with a heart

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

Being around people is exhausting. Being around Beau is like a really good version of being alone, as easy but more fun.

I guess I feel like someone forgot to write down my beginning, and I just showed up in the middle of things, in time for this." I hold my arms up in the sticky night air as if hugging the sky. "And I don't really get what I'm supposed to do with the present because I can't see the whole picture. But until I can figure out my own place in all of this, I want to hear other people's stories. Knowing stories that have been around forever and have almost been lost a hundred times already, it feels important.

If you want the good, you can't give up.

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.

It wouldn't matter," he says. "If we were in the same world, the one where Kincaid was in love with you, I'd still be here. If you wanted me, I'd be here."

"Why?" I ask.

He hides a grin and runs his thumb over my lips. "I'm not sure the world and me are as complicated as you think, Natalie. I didn't mean to choose you or anything. I just know if I only get to build one porch in my life, I'd like it to be yours, and if there's one person I never have to hurt or disappoint, I'd want that to be you too.

We both know that pain comes for us all. It's almost a relief. Because if all of us are going to someday lose the people we love most, or be lost by them, then what is there to do but live?

Sometimes the most beautiful moments in our lives are things that hurt badly at the time. We only see them for what they really were when we stand at the very end and look back.

Sometimes - sometimes good, or at least decent, people do bad things. And sometimes they actually believe they're doing what's right.

I'm getting my things for class when I feel a pair of hands slide down around my eyes.
"Guess Who."
"Harry Styles?"
"So close it's insane."
"Okay, give me a clue."
"I'm one of your biggest fans."
"I'm having a hard time, because the only thing that's coming to mind other than Harry Styles is the ghost of River Phoenix, and I wouldn't be able to feel his hands.

There are certain people you can just be silent with - like Dad, and Megan - and it's every bit as good as a long heart-to-heart.

There's nothing scarier than hearing someone you love cry, except imagining a world where that sound stops. Suddenly I can't breathe. Can't be here. There's nothing scarier than loving someone.

I thought missing my Dad would be the hardest thing I'd ever do; but the worst thing, the hardest thing, had turned out to be angry with someone you couldn't fight it out with.

How are you supposed to believe right's right and wrong's wrong if everyone around you says the opposite?

My Happily Ever After was a strand of strung-together happy-for-nows, extending back not to just a year ago, but to thirty years before.

It's true that nothing has the potential to hurt so much as loving someone, but nothing heals like it either.

I had to admit there was something singularly hilarious about line dancing angrily.

Honey, you're a smart kid, and you're sensitive too. That's not a bad thing, but it is a hard thing. For you, the dark's going to feel a whole lot darker, and you won't be able to hide from it. But I want you to listen to me. Listen good. You don't know everything, not yet you don't. And when you see those good things-and I promise you, there are so many good things-they're going to be so much brighter for you than they are for other people, just like the abyss seems deeper and bigger when you stare at it.

I told you so you'd see how this whole world was made for you, how it warms when you smile and aches when you hurt. I told you so you could stop being afraid.

No story is truer than any other story that has the truth in its heart

How many billions of things had to happen just right to give me this ordinary life.

The way to make the best decisions is to listen to all the stories and to know them by heart and to feel them in your bones

But not because I hate being pitied. I do, but it's more than that. When people pity, it's like they honestly don't realize the exact same thing's coming for them. And I feel embarrassed and uncomfortable and have to pity them, because, like, do you not realize it's always someone's turn? You haven't noticed everyone gets a few blows that seem so big you can't survive them? And then here is this person looking at you and dramatically murmuring, I'm sorry for your loss. And you have to look at them and hope your eyes aren't saying, Don't be too sorry. You're next. You have to spend all this energy making your face say, Yes it's horrible, and extremely rare. I can't believe I was the person who lost my father. You certainly won't lost anyone. You'll die first, out of everyone you love, on the eve of your hundredth birthday.

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.

There is always more to see and feel

Maybe for some people, falling in love is an explosion, fireworks against a black sky and tremors rumbling through the earth. One blazing moment. For me, it's been happening for months, as quietly as a seed sprouting. Love sneaked through me, spreading roots around my heart, until, in the blink of an eye, the green of it broke the dirt: hidden one moment, there the next.

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

For now, more swoon and less doom, babycakes

I did what any reasonable adult woman would do when confronted with her college rival turned next-door neighbor. I dove behind the nearest bookshelf.

I twist my fingers through his hair, press my lips to his cheek. The words tangle in my throat, being born and dying a thousand times. I love you.

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.

Because even though he would probably never learn to dance in the rain, it was Gus I wanted. Only Gus. Exactly Gus.
I had set myself up for heartbreak and now I suspected there was nothing I could do but brace myself and wait for it to hit.

...I'd realized how much I'd always love someone at the same moment I realized that person and I might never fit together again.

Sometimes you can change your mind about a person," I tell her. "Or your feelings for them change, or they change, or, I don't know, you just want to make a different decision. And that's always okay. You don't owe anyone anything. You know that, don't you?

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

What is love," she says, "other than putting someone else before you?

And then one day, our parents look at us and notice we're whole people. We're not a part of them anymore, even if they're a part of us. And for the ones who never really wanted to be parents anyway, that's probably a relief.

But it's also about the cost of love. To grow up is to love. To love is to die.

And sometimes, we don't talk about things because we don't want to be comforted. We don't want anyone to tell us it wasn't our fault, or that they forgive us, or that we did the best we could. We want to hold on to that pain because we think that's what we deserve. We worry that if we let it go, we're dishonoring it.

Sometimes the whole world feels like that horse to me, I say aloud. Does that make sense? Like everyone's just groaning & screaming through the pain, hoping something better comes out.

And I don't know exactly what makes it love, but when I saw you in the House of Mirrors, it was like I already knew exactly who you were. And I should've been wrong-that would've made more sense-but I wasn't, and I love you. I'll always love you. And someday maybe we'll have a bad breakup or grow apart and -curse or not-all the stars will burn out and the planet will have another ice age, but I'll go on loving you because I see you, June O'Donnell, and I can't unsee you.

Grandmother taugh me that eventually - whether with a thousand tiny fissures or one swift split - love will break your heart. My heart is breaking.

Judging a story by the ending alone, or life by its death alone, is as pointless as judging a long hike through the mountains by the fact that when you get back to where you parked your car, there's a pit toilet full of you know what and beer cans.

It's hard to feel like you belong when you don't know who you are.

Being with him feels like a better version of being alone.

I think once you've felt grief, it's hard not to catch someone else's.

God is a thing I know when I see, and I see It all over, in Megan, in the night sky and the morning sun, and especially in Grandmother.

See," Gus said. "It's shit like this that makes it impossible for me to believe in happy endings.
You never get the paper umbrellas you were promised in this world.

Just because you don't know what you want yet, it doesn't mean that there's nothing to want.

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.

And when you see those good things--and I promise you, there are so many good things--they're going to be so much brighter for you than they are for other people, just like the abyss always seems deeper and bigger when you stare at it. If you stick it out, it's all going to feel worth it in the end. Every moment you live, every darkness you face, they'll all feel worth it when you're staring light in the face.

Beau, what is it you want?"
"A porch," he says softly. He says it like it's my name, and right then, I think, what both of us want more than anything is something we can never have. "All I really want is to build a house with a nice, big porch that gets used every day.

I can tell you that the pain of living is worth it. That if you live, your life will be as full of love as it is darkness, and for every moment of pain, you'll have one of joy too.

Evil's something you can decide to do every day, and it gets easier every time. But the more good you bring into the world, maybe the more the rest of the world would look like this. Like paradise.

When I was your age, I knew nothing. Nothing about myself, nothing about the universe or about heartbreak. I remember being terrified to grow up, afraid of losing my friends, sure I'd lose my mind. Life felt like a blender that wanted to eat me.

God is a thing I think I see in glimmers all over: an enormous and vague warmth I sometimes catch pulsing around me, giving me shivers and making tears prick my eyes; a mysterious and limitless Thing threaded through all the world and refusing to be reduced to a name or a set of rules and instead winding itself through millions of stories, true and made up, connecting all breathing things. And

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. Things that got lost and had to be replaced on a regular basis.

His mouth slides down my neck, the side of his face settling over my heartbeat. "I hear you," he whispers, kissing my collarbone. "I can hear all of you, rushing around in there. A million Jacks and Juniors and Junes, a city of them.

Funny thing about belonging to two worlds: Sometimes you feel like you belong in zero.

It will - hopefully - be a place you can imagine existing, characters you believe could be real. And if we're lucky, maybe it will help someone. To feel known and understood, like their story matters.

Mom's first diagnosis taught me that love was an escape rope. But it was her second diagnosis that taught me love could be a life vest when you were drowning.

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

I HAVE A FATAL flaw.
I like to think we all do. Or at least that makes it easier for me when I'm writing -building my heroines and heroes up around this one self-sabotaging trait, hinging everything that happens to them on a specific characteristic: the thing they learned to do to protect themselves and can´t let go of, even when it stops serving them.

Megan's silent for a long moment before she murmurs, "I changed my mind."
"About what?"
"Denial," she says. "I don't want to live ther after all. I want to feel everything so much it hurts.

When you've been lost as I have," he once said, "you get good at finding your way home.

I shouldn't need everyone to believe in or want the things I believed in and wanted.

...sometimes it was okay to let a little ugliness into your story. That it would never rob you of all the beauty.

When people pity you, it's like they don't realize that the exact same thing is coming for them. And then I feel embarrassed and uncomfortable and have to pity them, because, like, do you not realize that it's always someone's turn? You haven't noticed everyone gets a few blows that seem so big you can't survive them?

Growing up is going to hurt. Only you can decide if the pain is worth the love.

The world is going to keep right on being beautiful and terrible all at once

She would fold herself around him to protect him. She would drink out all the darkness from him and pour out all her light on him. She would rebuild the whole world for him.

I wonder what that must feel like, to know that for sure. This is home.

We may be different, but in this moment we're feeling the exact same thing: the sad kind of bliss where you realize, suddenly, how perfect your life really has been all along. So perfect it hurts, and you could let yourself weep if you wanted. So perfect that even though everything you know is ending, you truly believe life will continue to be beautiful, even - or maybe especially - in those pure moments of loss.

Maybe we can stay in denial together forever?' I suggest.
...
'No, I mean, maybe there's a town called Denial, and we can literally move there and forget about college.

And because she jumped, our world began

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.

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.

Every moment of every day, I was tripping backward while the rest of the world marched forward.

... true love had seemed like the grand prize, the one thing that could weather any storm, save you from both drudgery and fear, and writing about it had felt like the single most meaningful gift I could ever give.
And even if that part of my worldview was taking a brief sabbatical, it had to be true that sometimes, heartbroken women found their happy endings, their rain-falling, music-swelling moments of pure happiness.

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

Maybe you are Saul's quarter-life crisis, but so what? Maybe he's yours. Or maybe you two are the luckiest people in the world and you've just found your fireworks-in-the-sky, holding-hands-until-you-die Forever Person. Guess what? There are drawbacks either way.
Maybe you break up and it sucks, but then you heal and move on and fall in love again. Or maybe this is it, the last person you'll ever have butterflies for, your last first kiss, but you get to grow up together, start your life together sooner. And you know what else? You don't have to be afraid to walk away either way...

I sometimes think I wouldn't feel so lost if she didn't try so hard to make me feel okay about looking for myself

There's little to feel when you love. There's nothing to fear when you are loved.

And that's when I'm lost, and in my place, the world gets born.

The only promise you ever had in life was the one moment you were living.

Gus still thought he was missing something, some special piece other people had, the thing that made people stay...