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Beach Read

Book by Emily Henry · 46 quotes · Love, Beach Read, Romance

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Beach Read Quotes

“I've never met someone who is so perfectly my favorite person. When I think about being with you every day, no part of me feels claustrophobic. And when I think about having to have the kinds of fights with you that Naomi and I used to have, there's nothing scary about it. Because I trust you, more than I've ever trusted anyone - The world looks different than I ever thought it could be, and I don't want to look for what's broken or what could go wrong. I don't want to brace myself for the worst and miss out on being with you. I want to be the one who gives you what you deserve - and I don't think I ever could deserve any of that, and I know this things between us isn't a sure thing, but that's what I want to aim for with you. Because I know no matter how long I get to love you, it will be worth whatever comes after.”

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“Sure, love happens," he said finally. "But it's better to be realistic so shit is not constantly blowing up in your face. And love is way more likely to blow up in your face than to bring eternal happiness. And if it doesn't hurt you, then you're the one hurting someone else. "Entering a relationship is borderline sadomasochistic. Especially when you can get everything you would from a romantic relationship from a friendship, without destroying anyone's life when it inevitably ends.”

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“I can miss my dad and hate him at the same time. I can be worried about this book and torn up about my family and sick over the house I'm living in, and still look at lake Michigan and feel overwhelmed by how big it is. I spent all last summer thinking I'd never be happy again, and now, a year later, I still feel sick and worried and angry, but at moments, I'm so happy. Bad things don't dig down through your life until the pit's so deep that nothing good will ever be big enough to make you happy again. No matter how much shit, there will always be wildflowers. There will always be Pete's and Maggies and rainstorms in forests and sun on waves.”

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“I felt so lost again. Every time I started to find my way, I seemed to slip further down. How could I trust what Gus and I have? How could I trust my own feelings? People were complicated. They weren't math problems; they were collections of feelings and decisions and dumb luck. The world was complicated too, not a beautifully hazy French film, but a disastrous, horrible mess, speckled with brilliance and love and meaning.”

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“In books, I'd always felt like the Happily Ever After appeared as a new beginning, but for me, it didn't feel like that. My Happily Ever After was a strand of strung-together happy-for-nows, extending back not just to a year ago, but to thirty years before. Mine had already begun, and so this day was neither an ending nor a beginning. It was just another good day. A perfect day. A happy-for-now, so vast and deep that I knew — or rather believed — I didn't have to worry about tomorrow.”

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“Finally,’ I said. ‘Something we agree on.’ ‘I bet we agree on a lot.’ He plucked a mangled maple-nut donut out and sat back, examining it in the fluorescent light. ‘Such as?’ ‘All the important stuff,’ Gus said. ‘The chemical composition of Earth’s atmosphere, whether the world needs six Pirates of the Caribbean movies, that White Russians should only be drunk you’re already sure you’re going to vomit anyway.”

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“I was a wound, half-healed-over and scraped raw again. "Everybody Hurts" was running through my mind. I could see the consolation of it, the idea that your pain wasn't unique. Something about that made it seem both bigger and smaller. Smaller because all the world was aching. Bigger because I could finally admit that every other feeling I'd been focusing on had been a distraction from the deepest hurt. My father was gone. And I would always miss him.”

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“He looked more at ease, more sure, like all this time I'd only ever come face-to-face with his shadow. Standing there in that moment, I felt like I'd stumbled upon something sacred, more intimate even than what had passed between us in the house. Like Gus had pulled back the curtains in the window of a house I'd been admiring, whose insides I'd been dreaming about but even so, underestimated. I liked seeing Gus like this, with the people he knew would always love him. We'd just had sex like the world was burning down around us, but if I ever got to kiss Gus again, I wanted it to be this version of him. The one who didn't feel so weighed down by the world around him that he had to lean just to stay upright.”

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“If you start at one point on a Möbius strip and you follow it straight around, when you’ve done the full loop, you don’t end up back where you started. You end up right above it, but on the other side of the surface. And if you keep following it around for a second time, you’ll finally end up where you started. So it’s this path that’s actually twice as long as it should be. At the time, I guess we thought it meant that the two of us added up to something bigger than we were on our own.”

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“I want to be the one who gives you what you deserve, and I want to sleep next to you every night and to be the one you complain about book stuff to, and I don’t think I ever could deserve any of that, and I know this thing between us isn’t a sure thing, but that’s what I want to aim for with you. Because I know no matter how long I get to love you, it will be worth whatever comes after.”

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“He was bad with me too, but it was a little more random. If the phone rang and woke him up, he'd hit me, or if he had plans to go out but had to cancel for snow, he'd knock me around to burn off his anger. I was always looking for the secret code, the rules I could follow so he wouldn't freak out. That's how you keep yourself safe, you know? You pay attention to how the world works. But there was no secret code for him. It was like our actions were entirely detached from his reaction to us.”

Child AbuseDomestic ViolenceDomestic AbuseFathers And SonsUnlovedIntimate Partner ViolenceUnprotected
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“It wasn’t that I couldn’t get enough of him. Or that he was the best man I’d ever known. (I’d thought that was my dad, but now it was the dad from my favorite 2000s teen drama, Veronica Mars.) Or that he was my favorite person. (That was Shadi.) Or because he made me laugh so hard I wept. (He laughed easily, but rarely joked.) Or that when something bad happened, he was the first person I wanted to call. (He wasn’t.) It was that we met the same age my parents had, that the snowball fight and impromptu road trip had felt like fate, that my mother adored him. He fit so perfectly into the love story I’d imagined for myself that I mistook him for the love of my life.”

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“Why do bad things happen? I thought. How will it all make sense? But no great truth appeared to me. There was no good reason this horrible thing had happened, and no reason Gus's life had been what it was either. Dammit, R.E.M. was right: Every single person on the planet had to take turns hurting. Sometimes all you could do was hold on to each other tight until the dark spat you back out.”

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“I don’t know,” Mom kept saying tearfully. “I don’t know, I just feel like it’s over.” “Our marriage?” Dad had asked after a long pause. “My life,” she’d told him. “I’m nothing but your wife. January’s mother. I’m nothing else, and I don’t think you can imagine how that feels. To be forty-two and feel like you’ve done everything you’re going to do.”

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