Top 120 Emma Straub Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “That was next-level friendship – locking someone in through marriage.”

— Emma Straub

102. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

106. “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

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

— Emma Straub

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Emma Straub

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Emma Straub

119. “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

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

— Emma Straub

121. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Emma Straub

136. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub