Emma Floyd > Emma's Quotes

“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place”
― Iain Thomas, I Wrote This For You

“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.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“The last-page ache. The deep breath in after you’ve set the book aside.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“Sometimes, even when you start with the last page and you think you know everything, a book finds a way to surprise you.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“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.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“You fucking undo me.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“All creatures can experience pestilence, famine, and death—but war, true war, that is a singularly human experience.”
― Laura Thalassa, War

“A woman should not be oddly pleasing. She should be a ball-busting, skull-crushing, badass motherfucker who is impossible to forget.”
― Laura Thalassa, Pestilence

“No matter how hopeless I feel, there's always a little more hope inside me. No matter how faithless I think I am, there is always something to believe in.”
― Lexi Ryan, These Hollow Vows

“Judging other people unfairly doesn’t define them; it defines you. And in the end everyone will be disappointed.”
― Jenn Bennett, Serious Moonlight

“Family isn’t always blood, and it isn’t contained in a single tree. It’s a forest.”
― Jenn Bennett, Serious Moonlight

“Fear is strange. It settles on chests and seeps through skin, through layers of tissue, muscle, and bone and collects in a soul-sized black hole, sucking the joy out of life, the pleasure, the beauty. But not the hope. Somehow, the hope is the only thing resistant to the fear, and it is that hope that makes the next breath possible, the next step, the next tiny act of rebellion, even if that rebellion is simply staying alive.”
― Amy Harmon, From Sand and Ash

“And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“You have to know what you stand for, not just what you stand against.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“That's what gets me through the day. Knowing that I could do it. That I'm strong enough to do it and I can get it done.”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

“My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.”
― Ayn Rand, Anthem

“Know what you want in life and go after it. I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities.”
― Ayn Rand, Anthem

“Because you don't notice the light without a bit of shadow. Everything has both dark and light. You have to play with it till you get it exactly right.”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

“I'm sorry, Gemma. But we can't live in the light all of the time. You have to take whatever light you can hold into the dark with you.”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

“Women who have power are always feared.”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

“What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful.”
― Scott Westerfeld, Uglies

“This time I really let loose. “I AM THE HERO OF MY OWN STORY.”
― Jenna Evans Welch, Love & Luck

“Being nice is a good thing. You can be strong and nice. You don’t have to be one or the other.”
― Beth O'Leary, The Flatshare

“It can take people time to notice and process emotional abuse.”
― Beth O'Leary, The Flatshare

“Some of us get dipped in flat, some in satin, some in gloss...." He turned to me. "But every once in a while, you find someone who's iridescent, and when you do, nothing will ever compare.”
― Wendelin Van Draanen, Flipped

“You've found a very peaceful place here. A special place. You've planted something, and now its blossoming. Very nice. A good spot to rest. My thanks to you for letting an old-timer shade under the branches of what you've grown.”
― Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes

“You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”
― Rosemarie Urquico

“I know I don’t get it, in the sense that I don’t have diabetes, too, but…maybe I understand it a little, living with something persistent and beyond your control. You can’t take it off or walk away from it or lay it down for awhile. And even when you’ve become accustomed to its reality, when it’s not really bad or good, it just…is, sometimes it’s hard when you’re with others. When you feel that sense of difference and distance from them as you deal with the part of yourself that they don’t understand, that you have to think about in social situations and in your daily life in ways they don’t.”
― Chloe Liese, The Mistletoe Motive

“No, Gabriella. I don’t think it’s silly or odd or strange or juvenile to hold on with both hands to the best parts of who we are when we’re young and not let life take that from you. I think it’s brave and badass and infuriatingly impossible not to admire you for it.”
― Chloe Liese, The Mistletoe Motive

“Your capacity for joy,” he says quietly. “It’s…humbling.”
― Chloe Liese, The Mistletoe Motive