Nina

“I don't know why, but it feels like a whole separate breakup. Accepting, now, the truth: That he's moved on. That all these moments I cling to, like little mental life rafts, are just memories for him.”
― Emily Henry, Happy Place

“Until you got here,” he rasps, “all this place had ever been was a reminder of the ways I was a disappointment, and now you’re here, and—I don’t know. I feel like I’m okay. So if you’re the ‘wrong kind of woman,’ then I’m the wrong kind of man.”

I can see all of the shades of him at once. Quiet, unfocused boy. Precocious, resentful preteen. Broody high schooler desperate to get out. Sharp-edged man trying to fit himself back into a place he never belonged to begin with.

That’s the thing about being an adult standing beside your childhood race car bed. Time collapses, and instead of the version of you you’ve built from scratch, you’re all the hackneyed drafts that came before, all at once.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“From the loneliness, from the fear that I would never escape it. Because feelings were changeable, and people were unpredictable. You couldn’t hold on to them through the force of will.”
― Emily Henry, Happy Place

“As soon as I say it, I want to take it back. I know how quickly he scrubbed me out of his life; I don't want to know how fast he got the shrapnel out of his heart.”
― Emily Henry, Happy Place