Top 120 Emma Straub Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

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

— Emma Straub

3. “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

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

— Emma Straub

5. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

11. “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

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

— Emma Straub

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

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

— Emma Straub

17. “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

18. “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

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

— Emma Straub

20. “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

21. “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. What would estrangement do, when your parents died, and you were sitting across from each other, sorting through decades of photographs and mismatched cutlery?”

— Emma Straub

22. “Sometimes Alice thought it was strange, how many people stayed within the zip code where they’d grown up, but then she thought about how many people in small towns and cities across the country did, too. It only seemed strange because this was New York, a place that regenerated every few years, populated by newcomers and transplants.”

— Emma Straub

23. “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

24. “People without children thought that having a newborn was the hardest part of parenthood, that upside down, the day is night twilight zone feedings and toothless wails. But parents knew better. Parents knew that the hardest part of parenthood was figuring out how to do the right thing in 24 hours a day, forever, and surviving all the times you failed.”

— Emma Straub

25. “There was nothing in life harder or more important than agreeing every morning to stay the course, to go back to your forgotten self of so many years ago, and to make the same decision.”

— Emma Straub

26. “It was funny, to think of a house outliving a person, but of course they usually did.”

— Emma Straub

27. “Alice hugged Mary longer than she’d ever hugged a relative stranger in her life. This was how people felt about their midwives, or platoon mates, or fellow hostages – they had seen things together that no one else would ever fully understand.”

— Emma Straub

28. “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

29. “Pregnancy was so bizarre, so full of unanticipated effects and side effects and side-side effects that Porter felt both connected to every woman who had ever lived and also like she were the first person on earth who this had happened to.”

— Emma Straub

30. “It didn’t matter that the bride’s dress was too tight or hadn’t come from Vera Wang – she was happy. She wanted to be with this man for the rest of her life, and he felt just the same way. They had chosen to make the leap and, having leapt, were delighted to find that the world was even more beautiful than they’d hoped.”

— Emma Straub

31. “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

32. “It’s a rental,” I said, realizing when I said it that our house was the only rental on the block. Maybe something unseemly had happened there: adultery, Judaism, modern dance.”

— Emma Straub

33. “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

34. “They had chosen to make the leap and, having leapt, were delighted to find that the world was even more beautiful than they’d hoped.”

— Emma Straub

35. “It was hard to keep a secret in a small town, but as Astrid had learned, everything was easier when you were a woman over fifty. That’s what made Astrid cry, she realized – Barbara.”

— Emma Straub

36. “There were some people who just needed to be married, who felt like they were only wearing one shoe when they were alone. Astrid had some friends like that – or she had had some friends like that. Women who needed a partner that badly tended to be unreliable friends, Astrid found, which was why they needed a new partner so badly when their first one died, smothered by all the marital attention.”

— Emma Straub

37. “It was still dark outside, and the air was windy, knocking small branches against the window. October was a good month to confront death – this was why Halloween worked. The trees were mostly bare and the air was warm enough that you hadn’t yet pulled out a heavy coat. It was a month on the cusp, nature shifting from one mode to another. In transition.”

— Emma Straub

38. “Wendy thought that one’s actions should be driven by the future, which Elliot knew was a brand of optimism he did not possess. He knew that the only thing that really drove anyone – drove him – was the past.”

— Emma Straub

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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. Transcendental meditation, maybe, but with hot dogs and the knowledge that everything would change, the good and the bad, and so you might as well appreciate the good.”

— Emma Straub

42. “There was never this – a day spent floating from one thing to another. This was how Alice imagined marriage, and family – always having someone to float through the day with, someone with who it didn’t take three emails and six texts and a last-minute reservation change to see one another. Everyone had it when they were kids, but only the truly gifted held on to it in adulthood. People with siblings usually had a leg up, but not always.”

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

44. “Her children were the way they were because of all the things she had done and all the things she had not done.”

— Emma Straub

45. “You love to fail, that’s all you love. – The Magnetic Fields.”

— Emma Straub

46. “Cecelia had so rarely been in the Big House without her parents before moving in, but now it was strange to have them there, like suddenly having visitors to a zoo be able to climb over the barriers and into the cages.”

— Emma Straub

47. “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

48. “The cruelest part of becoming middle-aged was that it came on the heels of one’s own youth, not some other, better youth, and that it was too late to start over.”

— Emma Straub

49. “Adults – even nice ones, like his parents, who understand that their children are autonomous human people and not robots created just to please them – couldn’t remember what it was like.”

— Emma Straub

50. “She wanted to choose a name that would work for a Supreme Court justice, or an engineer, or a stern but fair high school English teacher, the kind of person who would have a library named after her someday.”

— Emma Straub