Top 120 Emma Straub Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “You love to fail, that’s all you love. – The Magnetic Fields.”

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Emma Straub

109. “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

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

— Emma Straub

111. “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

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

— Emma Straub

113. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Emma Straub

119. “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

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

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

— Emma Straub

123. “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

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

— Emma Straub

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Emma Straub

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Emma Straub

136. “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

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

— Emma Straub

138. “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