Top 120 Emma Straub Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Emma Straub

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

112. “We’ve been married for fifteen years. But I still have to choose it. That doesn’t stop.”

— Emma Straub

113. “Do you know what year it is? It’s the year of the woman! Again! Women can do anything. We can do stupid things and amazing things and smart things and dumb things. And we don’t even need to get a permission slip!”

— Emma Straub

114. “The first time, Porter and Jeremy had broken up in person, and so this time, it seemed fine to do it over the phone.”

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

116. “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

117. “Wendy’s father stayed at home – truthfully, was there ever a more useless figure than a grandfather?”

— Emma Straub

118. “Her mother and Russell now lived in the same neighborhood of her mind, which felt like a remote Norwegian fjord, or Fiji, a place that it would take so long to travel to that she would never go in person, and so hard to imagine the time difference that it was never convenient to telephone. They were both there, still, inside her brain, and sometimes she would wake up in the middle of the night and think, Now, now, if I could just pick up the phone right now, maybe I could catch them.”

— Emma Straub

119. “It was still so strange to see her body – her young body, a body she hardly remembered as it was, because she’d been so busy seeing it as something it wasn’t.”

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

121. “Sometimes a lie wasn’t a lie when it got you closer to the truth. Sometimes a lie was more like a wish, or a prayer.”

— Emma Straub

122. “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

123. “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.”

— Emma Straub

124. “People said that the past and future didn’t exist, but they did. Just not at the same time. The past was right there, if you wanted to look at it. The only trick was knowing that your past was never the same twice, and the past was never the same for two people. Everyone looked at things through their own eyes, and also through every single thing that had happened before that moment. Even the present was iffy.”

— Emma Straub

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

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

— Emma Straub

137. “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