Book Lovers

by Emily Henry

That’s the thing about women. There’s no good way to be one. Wear your emotions on your sleeve and you’re hysterical. Keep them tucked away where your boyfriend doesn’t have to tend to them and you’re a heartless bitch.

Is there anything better than iced coffee and a bookstore on a sunny day? I mean, aside from hot coffee and a bookstore on a rainy day.

Why is my mother texting me about how hot you are?

You can’t control the passage of time, but you can soften its blow to your face.

“There isn’t for women either. There’s just tall women,” he says, “and the men too insecure to date them.”

It’s a feeling not unlike reading a really good book: all-consuming, worry-obliterating.

It’s never taken effort—that’s what made me fall in love with reading: the instant floating sensation, the dissolution of real-world problems, every worry suddenly safely on the other side of some metaphysical surface.

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

Thank you, I mouth. His chin dips as he smiles. Anything for you, he mouths. In my chest, something heavy turns over.

All these years spent thinking that I had superhuman self-control, and now I realize I just never put anything I wanted too badly in front of myself.

“If I had to pick one person to be in my corner, it’d be you. Every time. You take care of shit.”

Yes, you have lost something, but maybe, someday, you’ll find something too.

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

Maybe it’s possible to belong in a hundred different ways to a hundred different people and places.

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. No matter where we go, our love will stretch out to hold us, and that makes me feel like…like everything will be okay.