Top 500 Emily Henry Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 6 of 10

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

— Emily Henry

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

— Emily Henry

253. “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

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

— Emily Henry

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Emily Henry

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Emily Henry

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

— Emily Henry

269. “I met you,” she says, “and I finally belonged somewhere again.”

— Emily Henry

270. “She smiles, like when she looks back at it, all she sees is the happiness of that day she spent there with her parents, rather than the pain of what came after. Like even when something beautiful breaks, the making of it still matters.”

— Emily Henry

271. “If my professionalism is a gel manicure, then Charlie Lastra is apparently the industrial-grade acetone capable of burning right through it.”

— Emily Henry

272. “People doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. People doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Only getting what they wanted if it would ultimately destroy them.”

— Emily Henry

273. “Because nothing – not the beautiful and not the terrible – lasts.”

— Emily Henry

274. “As different as I’d thought we were, it felt a little bit like Gus and I were two aliens who’d stumbled into each other on Earth only to discover we shared a native language.”

— Emily Henry

275. “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

276. “He wasn’t afraid for things to get ugly, to see someone at their weakest, and he didn’t fall over himself trying to talk me out of my own feelings. He just witnessed them, and somehow, that let them finally get out of my body after years of imprisonment.”

— Emily Henry

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Emily Henry

281. “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

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

— Emily Henry

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

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

— Emily Henry

287. “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

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

— Emily Henry

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Emily Henry

293. “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

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

— Emily Henry

295. “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

296. “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

297. “It sounds so pathetic. I’m twenty-six years old with a full-time job and health insurance, and an apartment and student loan bills, and I live alone in New York City, but there are just some things you don’t want to have to do on your own.”

— Emily Henry

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

— Emily Henry

299. “Everything about my best friend was misleading to the men of Chicago. She was eccentric and loud, prone to heavy drinking and all-night partying, comfortable with casual hookups, always the funniest and most shocking person in any room, and she posted mostly nude selfies with increasing regularity. She was enigmatic, the closest to the stereotypical male fantasy I’d ever seen outside of a movie, but deep down she was, completely, a romantic.”

— Emily Henry

300. “I was seeing through rose-colored glasses, assigning meaning where there was none.”

— Emily Henry