Top 500 Emily Henry Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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.”

— Emily Henry

252. “It makes me proud, but also sort of sad. Maybe this is how parents feel when their kids grow up, like some piece of them has become fundamentally unknowable.”

— Emily Henry

253. “No one had chosen Gus. From the time he was a kid, no one had chosen him, and he was embarrassed by that, like it meant something about him. I wanted to tell him it didn’t. That it wasn’t because he was broken, but because everyone else was.”

— Emily Henry

254. “I didn’t know regular life could feel like this, like a vacation you don’t have to go home from.”

— Emily Henry

255. “The way your writing always makes the world seem brighter, and the people in it a little braver.”

— Emily Henry

256. “I love you, he tells me in a dozen different ways, and I say it back every time.”

— Emily Henry

257. “Your favorite book right now is The Giving Tree, but God, January, that book breaks my heart. Your mother is a bit like that tree and I worry you will be too. Don’t get me wrong. That’s a good way to be. But still. I wish you could be a bit stonier, like your old pop. Only for your own good.”

— Emily Henry

258. “You asked me who I was, and – it was like the answer came out of nowhere. Sometimes it feels like I didn’t even exist before that. Like you invented me.”

— Emily Henry

259. “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.”

— Emily Henry

260. “Sometimes the truth sucks.” “It’s always better to have the truth up front than to be misled.”

— Emily Henry

261. “You should know you’re safe with me. You shouldn’t spend every moment second-guessing how I feel when I’ve spent eight years telling you outright.”

— Emily Henry

262. “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.”

— Emily Henry

263. “Everything is changing. It has to. You can’t stop time. All you can do is point yourself in a direction and hope the wind will let you get there. Another maritime metaphor. I am truly a local’s worst nightmare. But the point stands: change happens.”

— Emily Henry

264. “You don’t know the difference between pity and sympathy,′ I said. ‘I’m not pitying you. It makes me sad to think of you being treated like that. It makes me ad to think you didn’t have the things all kids deserve. And yeah, it makes me mad and sad that a lot of people go through the things that you went through, but it’s even more upsetting because it’s you. And I know you and I like you and I want you to have a good life. That’s not pity. That’s caring about someone.”

— Emily Henry

265. “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.”

— Emily Henry

266. “People always talk about compartmentalization like it’s a bad thing, but I love the way that, when I work, everything else seems to get folded away neatly into drawers, the books I’m working on swelling to the forefront, immersing me every bit as wholly as reading my favorite chapter books did when I was a kid. Like there’s nothing to worry over, plan, mourn, or figure out.”

— Emily Henry

267. “Once, in a bad season of tension headaches, my doctor had told me that pain was our body demanding to be heard. “Sometimes it’s a warning,” she said. “Sometimes it’s a billboard.”

— Emily Henry

268. “You have a face for movies, not photographs,” I say. “Meaning?” “Meaning you’re extremely handsome in real life, when your face is moving how it does, but when one millisecond is captured, yes, sometimes you’re making a weird face.”

— Emily Henry

269. “I wanted to be special, Harriet,” he says. “And since I wasn’t, I settled for trying to make everyone love me. I know how ridiculous that sounds, but it’s true. I spent my whole life chasing things and people who could make me feel like I mattered.”

— Emily Henry

270. “Her laugh,′ she said finally ‘She snorted when she laughed.’ The corner of my mouth inched up but a new heaviness settled across my chest. ‘I love when people do that,’ I admitted. ‘My best friend does it. I always feel like she’s drowning in life. In a good way. Like it’s rushing up her nose, you know?”

— Emily Henry

271. “Straight men love bangs,” I say. “They make women approachable.”

— Emily Henry

272. “Bea giggles. It is, very likely, the sound that the earth made the first time it saw the sun come up.”

— Emily Henry

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

— Emily Henry

274. “There would be purpose. There would be beauty. There would be candlelight and Fleetwood Mac playing softly in the background.”

— Emily Henry

275. “Angry that these characters had deserved better than they’d gotten and somehow comforted by their experience. Yes, I thought. 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.”

— Emily Henry

276. “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.”

— Emily Henry

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

— Emily Henry

278. “To put it lightly, I don’t enjoy showering. Being clean, yes. The act of being in the shower, also yes. But everything about having to brush out my tangled hair beforehand, stepping out onto a ratty bath mat or tile floors, getting dry, combing my hair out again – I hate all of that, which means I’m a three-shower-a-week person to Alex’s one to two showers a day.”

— Emily Henry

279. “I mean that you have the weirdest laugh of anyone I’ve ever met, Harriet,” he says softly. “And it feels like taking a shot of tequila every time I hear it. Like I could get drunk on the sound of you. Or hungover when I go too long without you.”

— Emily Henry

280. “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.”

— Emily Henry

281. “My eyes flutter closed. When I open them, he’s gone. But I still feel him everywhere. I am Heathcliff.”

— Emily Henry

282. “What I didn’t know to expect is that today, I would feel like I’d been born too. You have made a new person: January’s father. And I know this is who I will be for the rest of my life.”

— Emily Henry

283. “I burst into laughter against my will, and he’s so visibly pleased it gives me a full-body twinge of pride. He wants to make me laugh.”

— Emily Henry

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

— Emily Henry

285. “I rarely said his name, though. It felt too much like an incantation. As if it would light me up from the inside, and he’d see how much I wanted him, how all day long my mind caught on him like a scar in a record. How, without even trying, I knew exactly where he was at all times, could likely cover my eyes, get spun around, and still point to him on the first try.”

— Emily Henry

286. “You try to be fair, to see things from other people’s points of view, and sometimes that makes it hard for you to see them from your own, but you have one.”

— Emily Henry

287. “I’ve never really felt alone since I met you. I don’t think I’ll ever feel truly alone in this world again as long as you’re in it.”

— Emily Henry

288. “I would rather have one tiny sliver of him forever than have all of him for just a moment and know I’d have to relinquish all of it when we were through.”

— Emily Henry

289. “Please don’t apologize for letting me know you.”

— Emily Henry

290. “I have an intense nighttime skin care routine. I don’t like to miss it, and it doesn’t all fit in a handbag.” My mom used to say, You can’t control the passage of time, but you can soften its blow to your face.”

— Emily Henry

291. “I’ve never really known how to look at art without someone else there to be my guidepost.”

— Emily Henry

292. “Even if Jason Stanley and every other bully from my past were here, mocking me through a megaphone, I don’t think I’d stop dancing clumsily with Alex in the street.”

— Emily Henry

293. “From watching Shadi’s love life, I knew how relationship-phobes like Gus Everett reacted when boundaries broke down, when things go from friendly to intimate, or from sexual to romantic. Guys like Gus were never the ones to pump the brakes when the emotional-entanglement train started moving, and they were always the ones to jump out and roll clear of the tracks once they realized they’d reached top speed.”

— Emily Henry

294. “I could plot all day, but it didn’t matter if I didn’t fall into the story headfirst, if the story itself didn’t spin like a cyclone, pulling me wholly into itself. 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.”

— Emily Henry

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

— Emily Henry

296. “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.”

— Emily Henry

297. “I used to write these notes in a kind of panic, like every experience I hoped to someday have was a living thing growing in my body, stretching branches out to push on my insides, demanding to break out of me.”

— Emily Henry

298. “I’m sleeping in a race car bed, Nora. Are you happy?”

— Emily Henry

299. “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.”

— Emily Henry

300. “I can be one of the guys, as long as the guys in question have a favorite song from Les Mis. Otherwise I’m hopeless.”

— Emily Henry