Top 120 Emma Straub Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Forward, that was the idea. Until the future, whatever it was going to be.”

— Emma Straub

52. “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

53. “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

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

— Emma Straub

55. “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

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

— Emma Straub

57. “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

58. “Maybe it was a blessing of childhood that most people couldn’t remember much before they were five – what good would it do to remember life as a savage toddler, totally divorced from societal norms? It was as if each human evolved from being a chimpanzee in a single lifetime. No one wanted to remember the jungle.”

— Emma Straub

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

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

— Emma Straub

64. “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

65. “Astrid wished that there was a button everyone could push that immediately showed only their good intentions – how much pain that would save. Nicky could see it, she thought. He kissed her on the cheek.”

— Emma Straub

66. “No one’s easy to love, Don’t look back, my dear, just say you tried – Sharon Van.”

— Emma Straub

67. “Cecelia was never the subject, she was an object. Even now, Birdie was doing the transforming; Cecelia was just a head in a chair.”

— Emma Straub

68. “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

69. “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

70. “The downside of Buddhism, as Cecelia understood it, and also of years of therapy, was that no one ever seemed to think anything was their fault. Everything was always open to everyone else’s feelings, or the ultimate balance of the universe. If the point of life was to let things go, then you never had to be sorry about anything.”

— Emma Straub

71. “She loved the watercooler, mostly because it was never her job to change it when the supply was getting low. She did not buy the toilet paper; thrillingly, she didn’t even replace a roll when there were only a few squares left. She was responsible for neither making her co-workers’ lunch nor ensuring that they ate it.”

— Emma Straub

72. “This was why she’d waited to tell her mother. Astrid’s standards for everyone else were the same as her standards for herself, which left no room for error.”

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

74. “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

75. “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

76. “Alice imagined a graph that showed how much people’s personalities shifted after high school on one axis and on the other, how many miles away from home they had moved.”

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

79. “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

80. “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

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

— Emma Straub

82. “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

83. “The boat looked too big, and for a moment, Astrid worried that it would sink immediately after they were all aboard, like a giant bath toy plunged to the seafloor.”

— Emma Straub

84. “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

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

— Emma Straub

86. “Choices were easy to make until you realized how long life could be.”

— Emma Straub

87. “Talking to a teacher outside of school – even just in the faculty parking lot – felt like acknowledging something that everyone spent their lives pretending wasn’t true, which is that teachers were people with whole lives, not just puppets who slept in their supply closets, eating only apples and dreaming of lesson plans.”

— Emma Straub

88. “Maybe this was motherhood, a feeling of benevolence for all human beings.”

— Emma Straub

89. “Kristen was the kind of woman who murmured sweetly to strangers’ screaming children in elevators, when everyone else turned their eyes toward the ceiling and prayed to be sucked up by a tractor beam from outer space.”

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

91. “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

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

— 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. “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

95. “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

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

— Emma Straub

97. “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

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

— Emma Straub

99. “It’s not about the time. It’s about how you spend it. Where you put your energy –.”

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub