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

251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Emily Henry

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

— Emily Henry

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

— Emily Henry

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

— Emily Henry

262. “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

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

— Emily Henry

264. “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

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

— Emily Henry

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Emily Henry

272. “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

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

— Emily Henry

274. “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

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

— Emily Henry

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Emily Henry

283. “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

284. “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

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

— Emily Henry

286. “I think life is about learning to dance even when you’re sitting still.”

— Emily Henry

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

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

— Emily Henry

291. “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

292. “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.”

— Emily Henry

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

— Emily Henry

294. “Maybe things can always get better between people who want to do a good job loving each other.”

— Emily Henry

295. “But carving turns you into a knife. Cold, hard, sharp, at least on the outside.”

— Emily Henry

296. “How is it possible for two people who belong together to belong in two different places?”

— Emily Henry

297. “So yes, sometimes making art is a horror story. But other times, you fall head over heels in love. Either way, you’ll probably laugh.”

— Emily Henry

298. “It’s incredibly annoying, but the second I’m comfortable again, I find myself smiling in the dark, feeling so unbelievably lucky to sleep every night beside my favorite person in the world. Even being uncomfortably warm is better with him.”

— Emily Henry

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

— Emily Henry

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

— Emily Henry