Top 120 Emma Straub Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The way you spend your days is the way you spend your life.”

— Emma Straub

2. “Any story could be a comedy or a tragedy, depending on where you ended it. That was the magic. How the same story could be told an infinite number of ways.”

— Emma Straub

3. “The sound of her father working – guitars wailing through the speakers, his slippered feet shuffling down the hall, his fingers punching away at the keyboard – was as comforting to her as a white noise machine. It meant he was there, he was writing, and that he was happy, in his way.”

— Emma Straub

4. “People spent so much time talking about falling in love, but making friends was just as hard – if you thought about it, it was crazy: Here, meet some total strangers, tell them all your secrets, expect no hurt or humiliation to come of it.”

— Emma Straub

5. “She felt like she always had on certain summer nights, like she was already missing the moment that she was still living inside.”

— Emma Straub

6. “It’s okay to lose people, Al. Loss is the point. You can’t take away the grief, the pain, because then what are you left with?”

— Emma Straub

7. “A good swimming pool could do that – make the rest of the world seem impossibly insignificant, as far away as the surface of the moon.”

— Emma Straub

8. “It wasn’t fair when people moved away – they took so much of you with them, without even meaning to.”

— Emma Straub

9. “That seemed like the goal – another person to help manage the logistics of a full, busy life, someone whose face you liked, someone you could live with for fifty years without throwing each other out the window.”

— Emma Straub

10. “Birthdays were inherently disappointing – they always had been. There wasn’t a birthday she could remember truly enjoying.”

— Emma Straub

11. “Astrid looked for the pepper grinder, her fingers waggling over the table like a star-nosed mole sniffing out a meal.”

— Emma Straub

12. “She was so tough that no one ever checked in on her, just to make sure she was doing okay, because she was always doing okay.”

— Emma Straub

13. “The Internet was excellent for confirming one’s worst fears about the human race.”

— Emma Straub

14. “That was easy, coming home and being a kid again, because presumably they got to be an adult the other 360 days a year. When you were in your childhood house on a regular basis, it was harder to separate the past and the present – nostalgia only worked with distance.”

— Emma Straub

15. “It seemed so easy, to cut out the creeps and sexual predators, just by cutting out all the men. Sure, you’d lose some decent people, but the net result would be so positive, who would complain?”

— Emma Straub

16. “With two parents, there was always someone else to blame for being difficult, but with one, there was no cushion.”

— Emma Straub

17. “There wasn’t enough time in the world, not for the things that mattered most.”

— Emma Straub

18. “People said that everyone was born alone and everyone would die alone, but they were wrong. When someone was born, they brought so many people with them, generations of people zipped into the marrow of their tiny bones.”

— Emma Straub

19. “She wasn’t the only one who wanted to fast-forward, she understood. Maybe everyone wanted to zoom through space in one direction or the other, and the trick was finding people who wanted to go the same way you did, to help pass the time.”

— Emma Straub

20. “The tie made the silver streak in her hair – a blaze, Astrid had learned it was called, like Susan Sontag, or Cruella de Vil – sparkle.”

— Emma Straub

21. “What did it feel like to see him and not worry if it would be the last time?”

— Emma Straub

22. “If the Enchanted Forest were in a movie, they’d always be playing Bob Dylan or Van Morrison or maybe even Leonard Cohen in the background. Greta thought about that a lot. Sometimes when she was taking a shower or helping her mom in the restaurant, she’d imagine what kind of scene it would be and what would be playing to set the mood.”

— Emma Straub

23. “This time tomorrow, where will we be?”

— Emma Straub

24. “Astrid was surprised they still taught J. D. Salinger in school – he had slept with a teenager, hadn’t he? They should just be reading Toni Morrison. It seemed so easy, to cut out the creeps and sexual predators, just by cutting out all the men. Sure, you’d lose some decent people, but the net result would be so positive, who would complain?”

— Emma Straub

25. “Going to one school from age five to age eighteen was like being buried in amber. It wasn’t even like his walls, which were covered with layers of things – you had to be the same person from start to finish, with no big cognitive jumps.”

— Emma Straub

26. “Forward, that was the idea. Until the future, whatever it was going to be.”

— Emma Straub

27. “There are too few opportunities, as an adult, to be surrounded by friends after midnight.”

— Emma Straub

28. “Her children had been children, and now they were adults; they were all adults here, now.”

— Emma Straub

29. “The twins were the happiest Porter had ever seen, waving at everyone, and Wendy and Elliot both beamed, at each other and the world. It took so little, truly, to turn a parent’s frown upside down.”

— Emma Straub

30. “He had been young, and she had been young – they had been young together. Why was it so hard to see that, how close generations were? That children and their parents were companions through life.”

— Emma Straub

31. “Mothering seemed like downhill skiing, or cooking elaborate meals from scratch – sure, anyone could learn how to do it, but it was much easier for the people who had seen other people do it first, and well, from a very young age.”

— Emma Straub

32. “She herself was an only child, and she found old people with siblings somewhat ridiculous, as if they were eighty-year-olds who still wore water wings in swimming pools. Siblings were for the very young and needy. She had given her children siblings to occupy each other in childhood.”

— Emma Straub

33. “Parents knew that the hardest part of parenthood was figuring out how to do the right thing twenty-four hours a day, forever, and surviving all the times you failed.”

— Emma Straub

34. “Alice wasn’t sure – she hadn’t been sure then, and even decades later, she thought she could have chosen a hundred different things and had a hundred different lives. Sometimes she felt like everyone she knew had already become whatever they were going to be come, and she was still just waiting.”

— Emma Straub

35. “Her “work.” It was work, of course, but when he said it, she knew that he whispered those quotation marks, that he thought anything that took place inside their houses’s walls was playtime. As if children’s playtime was playtime for their parents. As if it wasn’t work, to keep the house and the children from bursting into flames, to keep herself from lighting the match. Men understood so little.”

— Emma Straub

36. “October was the most glorious month of the year – the summers could be hot and the winters snowy, but fall was perfection.”

— Emma Straub

37. “Maybe that was the trick to life: to notice all the tiny moments in the day when everything else fell away and, for a split second, or maybe even a few seconds, you had no worries, only pleasure, only appreciation of what was right in front of you.”

— Emma Straub

38. “Everyone Porter knew would have benefited from whole-family therapy for their entire lives, but who did that? Sibling relationships were as complicated as any marriage, without the possibility of divorce.”

— Emma Straub

39. “Love didn’t cure all, not in terms of missed communication and hurt feelings during an otherwise uneventful dinner conversation. Love couldn’t change the misread tone of a text message or a quick temper.”

— Emma Straub

40. “Outside, sunlight sparkled off the surface of the water, as if the ocean wanted to show the sky exactly how astonishing it was.”

— Emma Straub

41. “There was no excuse, except for the excuse that perfection was impossible, and failure inevitable.”

— Emma Straub

42. “She was beautiful, after a fashion, like a catalog model, with all the parts in the right place but nothing extraordinary that would distract you from the shorts she was selling.”

— Emma Straub

43. “Having a daughter whose company he actually enjoyed was one of his favorite accomplishments.”

— Emma Straub

44. “When she was a teenager, the 1980s had felt far away, a lifetime ago, but now, when she was so many more decades ahead, 1996 still felt recent. The first twenty years of her life had gone by in slow motion – the endless summers, the space from birthday to birthday almost immeasurable – but the second twenty years had gone by in a flash. Days could still be slow, of course, but weeks and months and sometimes even years zipped along, like a rope slipping through your hands.”

— Emma Straub

45. “Life would be so much more interesting if one could ask all the questions one wanted to and expect honest answers.”

— Emma Straub

46. “Wendy had always loved her mother, in her own way, the way one loves an airplane for not crashing into a mountainside, but once the boys were born, she appreciated her too.”

— Emma Straub

47. “He had been young, and she had been young – they had been young together. Why was it so hard to see that, how close generations were? That children and their parents were companions through life. Maybe that’s why she was here now. Maybe this was the moment when they were both at their best, and together.”

— Emma Straub

48. “What a very long time one had to be an adult, after rushing through childhood and adolescence.”

— Emma Straub

49. “One upside to having a single parent was not rushing to get married, like so many people she knew had, just because they were trying to be adults. It was embarrassing, if you slowed down long enough to think about it, how many major life decisions happened because they looked like the model you’d been given.”

— Emma Straub

50. “That was the truth of a successful marriage that Astrid understood: All you had to do was not get divorced or die!”

— Emma Straub