Top 120 Emma Straub Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Why was it so hard to see that, how close generations were? That children and their parents were companions through life.”

— Emma Straub

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

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

— Emma Straub

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Emma Straub

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “All anyone in the middle of puberty wanted was a larger rock to hide under, and the spotlight pointed somewhere else.”

— Emma Straub

75. “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

76. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

79. “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

80. “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

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

— Emma Straub

82. “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

83. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

93. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

96. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub