Funny Story

by Emily Henry

You can’t untell someone your secrets. You can’t unsay those delicate truths once you learn you can’t trust the person you handed them to.

“Things go smoother if you don’t let people get a rise out of you,” he says. “If you give them control over how you feel, they’ll always use it.” “Finally, I see your cynical side,” I say. He smiles, but his jaw is tight, and the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “It’s not cynical. If you don’t give other people responsibility for your feelings, you can have a decent relationship with most of them.”

I want to know myself, to test my edges and see where I stop and the rest of the world begins.

“I don’t want you to move away. I like you.” “You like everyone,” I remind him. “I’m highly replaceable.” He rolls his eyes. “You really think you have me figured out, don’t you?”

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

Feeling like I was living it. Being, even as a child, bowled over by how something imaginary could become real, could wring every emotion from me or make me homesick for places I’d never been.

“everything worth doing comes with some risk.”

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

“You’re not broken. You’re okay. But what happened to you isn’t. It’s fucked up.”

Every time he looks over, it’s like the sun peeking out from behind a cloud, and I do my best to feel content, to be just another person at the edge of his glow.

“I just think,” I say to Miles, “you like people almost as much as they like you. And it makes being around you feel like—like standing in sunlight.”

North Bear Shores

IYKYK 🥹

“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 want to be seen. I want to be loved. I want to live with the hope that things can get better, even if, in the end, they don’t.

But you—you make love so easy, Daphne. You make me think I already deserve it, exactly how I am.

You’re wonderful. You’re the reason for the word wonderful. It really shouldn’t be used for anything else. You make me want to see the best in everyone. You’re the person I want to be with when everything’s going wrong, instead of just wanting to skip over those times entirely.

“You aren’t what I pictured,” I say. “You are so, so, so much better than what my cynical little brain could’ve ever come up with.”