Book Lovers

by Emily Henry

Mom’s theory was that youthful skin would make a woman more money (true in both acting and waitressing), good underwear would make her more confident (so far, so true), and good books would make her happy (universal truth),

Sometimes, even when you start with the last page and you think you know everything, a book finds a way to surprise you.

Because then—and only then—I knew it was safe to come apart.

In my favorite books, it’s never quite the ending I want. There’s always a price to be paid.

I used to think it was because people like me don’t get those endings. And asking for it, hoping for it, is a way to lose something you’ve never even had.

The ones that speak to me are those whose final pages admit there is no going back. That every good thing must end. That every bad thing does too, that everything does.

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. Like if I surface too fast I might get the bends.

Because nothing—not the beautiful and not the terrible—lasts.

The last-page ache. The deep breath in after you’ve set the book aside.

Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either.

Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt.

As I wander along the hundreds of pristine spines, time unspools around me, the current slowing. I have nowhere to be. Nothing to do but peruse summaries and pull quotes on dust jackets, skimming some last pages and leaving others unread.

all those thousands of writers who’ve tried to describe the sensation of following the trail of your life for years, only to smack into something that changes it forever.

“For anyone who wants it all,” she begins, “may you find something that is more than enough.”