Top 120 Emma Straub Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “All anyone in the middle of puberty wanted was a larger rock to hide under, and the spotlight pointed somewhere else.”

— Emma Straub

52. “Sometimes Astrid thought about that, about Russell traveling to and from his home and office, landline to landline, and it seemed impossibly quaint.”

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

54. “Wendy thought that one’s actions should be driven by the future, which Elliot knew was a brand of optimism he did not possess.”

— Emma Straub

55. “Maybe that was the key to all good relationships, having oceans of time apart.”

— Emma Straub

56. “That’s what best friends did: ruin people for everyone else.”

— Emma Straub

57. “He wasn’t religious, and so neither was she. Fiction, maybe, or art – were those religions? Believing that the stories you told could save you, and could reach everyone you had ever loved?”

— Emma Straub

58. “Dreams didn’t mean anything. Nicky thought they did, but Nicky had always been so good-looking that he believed in all kinds of things that less good-looking people weren’t allowed to believe in, because people would laugh at them.”

— Emma Straub

59. “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

60. “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

61. “It was the worst fact of parenthood, that what you did mattered so much more than anything you said.”

— Emma Straub

62. “One of the worst parts of the whole thing, Alice understood, was that doctors were almost always guessing. They were smart people, and the guesses were informed by tests and trials and years of experience, but they were guessing nonetheless.”

— Emma Straub

63. “People were polite here, on the whole. They were rule followers, and do-gooders. They voted in midterm elections. They mowed their lawns.”

— Emma Straub

64. “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

65. “When someone was born, they brought so many people with them, generations of people zipped into the marrow of their tiny bones.”

— Emma Straub

66. “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

67. “Maybe there were endless opportunities for parties, and for love, if you built a life that made room for them.”

— Emma Straub

68. “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

69. “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

70. “Could one person do everything the same way twice, even if they were trying?”

— Emma Straub

71. “Cecelia just knew how things worked and knew that projecting confidence was her only hope for survival, the way some harmless snakes had almost identical markings to very deadly ones.”

— Emma Straub

72. “He had been the Homecoming King, paired with Jordan Rothman, their classmate whom Porter had detested since preschool for her toxic combination of beauty, athleticism, and healthy self-confidence.”

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

74. “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

75. “Why bother getting married, going through all the pomp and pageantry, if you didn’t think it was going to last? It was far easier to live in sin and not have to deal with the paperwork.”

— Emma Straub

76. “This was the job of a child: to grow up anyway.”

— Emma Straub

77. “Astrid knew that her life had changed, the shock of which was indistinguishable from relief.”

— Emma Straub

78. “She looked exactly like Barbara, only shrunken 15 percent in a xerox machine.”

— Emma Straub

79. “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

80. “If Porter had had a baby when she was young, it wouldn’t have been like that. She would have been measuring ounces of milk and counting diapers and calling the pediatrician every time the baby sneezed, full of anxiety, the way God intended.”

— Emma Straub

81. “Dogs were gloriously uncomplicated creatures – food and play and sleep and love, that was all they needed.”

— Emma Straub

82. “Change happens without us noticing. We’re lobsters in a pot.”

— Emma Straub

83. “There was only the internet and the paths you chose for whatever stupid reason that seemed right at the time, when you had one extra drink at a party, or were feeling lonely at exactly the moment that someone else was too. And wasn’t everyone, always?”

— Emma Straub

84. “A wiry orange cat darted out and ran down the front steps. “She’ll come back,” he said, unalarmed.”

— Emma Straub

85. “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

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

— Emma Straub

87. “More than not wanting a giant party, she didn’t want to feel unworthy of one.”

— Emma Straub

88. “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

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

— Emma Straub

90. “It seemed so easy, to cut out the creeps and sexual predators, just by cutting out all the men.”

— Emma Straub

91. “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

92. “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

93. “What was the percentage of people who actually got to die while feeling loved and supported by their spouse?”

— Emma Straub

94. “She’d never really been friends with boys, not since she was in preschool. Even then, there always seemed to be a threat of kissing, or being punched, like boys had no agency over their own bodies and were being controlled by tiny aliens who lived in their brains. Of course, now the girls were even worse, and the boys at her old school now seemed like stuffed animals in comparison, docile idiots for whom pizza solved any emotional difficulty. Maybe it was time to give boys another try.”

— Emma Straub

95. “That was another thing Porter was going to do as a mom – she was going to ask her daughter how she was, and what she was feeling, at least once a week, if not once a day. She would wait for the answer.”

— Emma Straub

96. “She wasn’t into public displays of anything except irritation.”

— Emma Straub

97. “The men died first, of course, in Clapham and everywhere else. When the apocalypse came, there would be only old women left, with hard candy and clementines in their bags.”

— Emma Straub

98. “Astrid did not like to apologize. She did not like to admit that she’d done anything wrong.”

— Emma Straub

99. “That was next-level friendship – locking someone in through marriage.”

— Emma Straub

100. “Some people smoked crack in alleyways. Franny ate chocolate. On the scale of things, it seemed entirely reasonable.”

— Emma Straub