Emery Lord > Quotes

“In friendship we are all debtors. We all owe each other for a thousand small kindnesses, for little moments of grace in the chaos.”
― Emery Lord, The Start of Me and You

“Knowing what happens is different from knowing how it happens. And the getting there is the best part.”
― Emery Lord, The Start of Me and You

“My dark days made me strong. Or maybe I already was strong, and they made me prove it.”
― Emery Lord, When We Collided

“Because with true friends, no one is keeping score. But it still feels good to repay them – even in the tiniest increments.”
― Emery Lord, The Start of Me and You

“Even the constellations can see us now: we are seventeen and shattered and still dancing. We have messy, throbbing hearts, and we are stronger than anyone could ever know.”
― Emery Lord, When We Collided

“His eyes are somewhere between gray and blue, and his hair is somewhere between brown and blond, and I am somewhere between hostile and attracted.”
― Emery Lord, Open Road Summer

“Love extra, even if it means you hurt extra,too”
― Emery Lord, The Start of Me and You

“That's the thing they never tell you about love stories: just because one ends, that doesn't mean it failed. A cherry pie isn't a failure just because you eat it all. It's perfect for what it is, and then it's gone. And exchanging the truest parts of yourself--all the things you are--with someone? What a slice of life. One I'll carry with me into every single someday.”
― Emery Lord, When We Collided

“Like you had been drowning, and the book was air.”
― Emery Lord, The Start of Me and You

“If we could capture feelings like we capture pictures, none of us would ever leave our rooms. It would be so tempting to inhabit the good moments over and over again. But I don't want to be the kind of person who lives backwardly, who memorializes moments before she's finished living in them. So I plant my feet here on this hillside beside a boy who is undoing me, and I kiss him back like I mean it. And, God help me, with the sky wrapped around us in every direction, I do mean it.”
― Emery Lord, Open Road Summer

“I keep wondering if it'll ever hurt less. This...this hole in our lives." "Oh, I imagine it'll hurt less eventually. I think there will always be a hole, though. But lace is one of the most beautiful fabrics, you know. All those holes and gaps, but it's still complete somehow- still lovely.”
― Emery Lord, When We Collided

“Ryan Chase was my eighth-grade collage, aspirational and wide-eyed. But Max was the first bite of grilled cheese on a snowy day, the easy fit of my favorite jeans, that one old song that made it onto every playlist. Peanut-butter Girl Scout cookies instead of an ornate cake. Not glamorous or idealized or complicated. Just me.”
― Emery Lord, The Start of Me and You

“Nothing, not even sadness could be greater than the sum of us.”
― Emery Lord, The Start of Me and You

“You are the only person who can build emotional barriers, but you're also the only person who can topple them. Other people can't knock down the walls you've built, no matter how much they love you. You have to tear them down yourself because there's something worth seeing on the other side.”
― Emery Lord, Open Road Summer

“I think it's the bravest thing in the world - to run straight at love, even knowing how badly you could get hurt.”
― Emery Lord, Open Road Summer

“I want to reach back into my history with a grade-school pink eraser, scrubbing away my decisions like mistakes on a math test. To bad I drew my mistakes in ink.”
― Emery Lord, Open Road Summer

“You can be okay again. Just a different kind of okay than before.”
― Emery Lord, The Names They Gave Us

“Okay," he said, leaning closer to me. "I have a proposition for you." Dear God, let it be marriage, I thought.”
― Emery Lord, The Start of Me and You

“We're all Elizabeths when we need to be.”
― Emery Lord, The Start of Me and You

“I dig the toe of my shoe into the dirt. “It’s complicated.”
“Is it? Most complicated things in life are actually pretty simple at the core. We put so much extra nonsense in the middle that we can’t even see how easy it really is.”
― Emery Lord, Open Road Summer

“You're always preparing yourself for the thing that is most likely to happen, instead of hoping for the thing that you most want to happen.”
― Emery Lord, The Start of Me and You

“In books, sometimes the foreshadowing is so obvious that you know what’s going to happen. But knowing what happens isn’t the same as knowing how it happens. Getting there is the best part.”
― Emery Lord, The Start of Me and You

“No matter what heaven you believe in, your time on this earth will end. What I’m saying is that you should listen—really listen—to the slosh of the waves and the distant call of Pacific birds. You should feel a boy’s pulse against your cheek; you should fill your lungs with ocean air. While you can, I mean. You should do these things while you still can.”
― Emery Lord, When We Collided

“Sometimes we get it wrong the first time. But you only have to get it right once.”
― Emery Lord, The Start of Me and You

“Maybe we were dying planets, Jonah, being drawn into the darkness.” I hold my right palm against his cheek, and I wish I could touch him with both my hands. “When we collided, we bounced each other back into orbit. And now we have to do that—we have to return to our own paths because that’s what we gave each other.”
― Emery Lord, When We Collided

“Laughter feels like our flotation device -- it won't pull us out of the storm, but it might carry us through, if we can just hang on.”
― Emery Lord, Open Road Summer

“But the point is that trying to make things better sometimes makes us better, too. The point is I'm trying to create good things in the midst of the bad. Grief or no grief. And in my case, it's still somewhere in between.”
― Emery Lord, When We Collided

“I know this feeling of being a ghost in your own life - no one sees you, no one feels you, so you stay still as if you could actually disappear at any moment.”
― Emery Lord, When We Collided

“It's an understandable impulse, to be on the floor when everything is falling apart, like you just want to feel the solid ground beneath you. When you're on the floor, there's nowhere farther to fall.”
― Emery Lord, Open Road Summer

“Strawberry milk,” I say, eyeing him as we head toward the counter. “Really.”
He turns to me. “Do you have something to say about my snack selections?”
“Nope.” I fall into line behind him. “I just didn’t realize you were a middle-school girl going to a slumber party.”
“And I,” he says, plunking his strawberry-fest down on the counter, “didn’t realize you were a soccer mom justifying her chocolate craving with the fact that raisins are a fruit.”
― Emery Lord, Open Road Summer