Top 120 Emma Straub Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Having a daughter whose company he actually enjoyed was one of his favorite accomplishments.”

— Emma Straub

52. “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

53. “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

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

— Emma Straub

55. “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

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

— Emma Straub

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Emma Straub

61. “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

62. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

65. “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

66. “Astrid and Birdie were inside, and Juliette was sneaking a cigarette around the corner. Being French was like being a teenager forever, gorgeous and immortal.”

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

68. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

71. “Rachel didn’t know what she was having, a choice that Porter respected in other people but could never have handled herself, like being a marathon runner or going camping in the winter.”

— Emma Straub

72. “There was nothing frightening about being in a place where you were always surrounded by hundreds of people – there was always someone nearby who could hear you scream.”

— Emma Straub

73. “Cecelia felt like a much larger alarm should sound every time someone in school said or thought or did something enormous and life-changing, something that their adult selves would remember for the rest of their lives, every time a bowling ball began its heavy roll. But of course then that alarm would sound constantly, all day long, and no one would be able to learning anything at all.”

— Emma Straub

74. “Timing was everything – that was more and more obvious the older you got, when you finally understood that the universe wasn’t held together in any way that made sense. There was no order, there was no plan. It was all about what you’d had for breakfast, and what kind of mood you were in when you walked down a certain hallway, and whether the person who tried to kiss you had good breath or bad. There was no fate. Life was just happenstance and luck, bound together by the desire for order.”

— Emma Straub

75. “Being in the middle meant no one remembered anything except as a foggy mist, just the most general idea that Porter had been there. That was sometimes how Cecelia felt about her parents, too, though of course she was an only child and they had no one else to pay attention to, other than themselves.”

— Emma Straub

76. “Porter wasn’t used to her mother hugging her, and so it took them a few minutes to figure out which arms should go where, but they did it, eventually.”

— Emma Straub

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “Being an adult was like always growing new layers of skin, trying to fool yourself that the bones underneath were different too.”

— Emma Straub

82. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

86. “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

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

— Emma Straub

88. “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

89. “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

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

— Emma Straub

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

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

— Emma Straub

98. “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

99. “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

100. “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