Top 120 Emma Straub Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— Emma Straub

104. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Emma Straub

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Emma Straub

131. “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

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

— Emma Straub

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Emma Straub

136. “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

137. “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