Emma Straub > Quotes

“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.”
― Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“Any story could be a comedy or a tragedy, depending on where you ended it. That was the magic. How the same story could be told an infinite number of ways.”
― Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“The way you spend your days is the way you spend your life.”
― Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“All her life, she'd thought of death as the single moment, the heart stopping, the final breath, but now she knew that it could be much more like giving birth, with nine months of preparations. Her father was heavily pregnant with death, and there was little to do but wait.”
― Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“Grief was something that moved in and stayed. Maybe it moved from one side of the room to the other, farther away from the window, but it was always there.”
― Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“Happy endings were too much for some people, false and cheap, but hope - hope was honest. Hope was good.”
― Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“Why was it so hard to see that, how close generations were? That children and their parents were companions through life.”
― Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“It was embarrassing, if you slowed down long enough to think about it, how many major life decisions happened because they looked like the model you'd been given.”
― Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“Alice wondered if no one ever felt as old as they were because it happened so slowly, and you were only ever one day slower and creakier, and the world changed so gradually that by the time cars had evolved from boxy to smooth, or green taxis had joined yellow ones, or MetroCards had replaced tokens, you were used to it. Everyone was a lobster in the pot.”
― Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“It was the worst fact of parenthood, that what you did mattered so much more than anything you said.”
― Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“Families were nothing more than hope cast out in a wide net, everyone wanting only the best.”
― Emma Straub, The Vacationers

“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, This Time Tomorrow

“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. Marriages, like ships, needed steering, and steady hands at the wheel.”
― Emma Straub, The Vacationers

“Sometimes people didn't understand that--Alice wasn't a writer, but she'd spent enough time sitting at dinner tables with novelists to understand that fiction was a myth. Fictional stories, that is. Maybe there were bad ones out there, but the good ones, the good ones--those were always true. Not the facts, not the rights and the lefts, not the plots, which could take place in outer space or in hell or anywhere in between, but the feelings. The feelings were the truth.”
― Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“People without children thought that having a newborn was the hardest part of parenthood, that upside down, the day is night twilight zone feedings and toothless wails. But parents knew better. Parents knew that the hardest part of parenthood was figuring out how to do the right thing in 24 hours a day, forever, and surviving all the times you failed.”
― Emma Straub, All Adults Here

“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, This Time Tomorrow

“People said that everyone was born alone and everyone would die alone, but they were wrong. When someone was born, they brought so many people with them, generations of people zipped into the marrow of their tiny bones.”
― Emma Straub, All Adults Here

“The problem with adulthood was feeling like everything came with a timer.”
― Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“But no one ever talked to me about it, that's for sure--what it feels like to love someone so much, and then have them change into someone else. You love that new person, but it's different, and it all happens so fast, even the parts that feel like they just last for fucking ever while they're happening.”
― Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“This was the job of a parent: to fuck up, over and over again. This was the job of a child: to grow up anyway.”
― Emma Straub, All Adults Here

“So much of becoming an adult was distancing yourself from your childhood experiences and pretending they didn’t matter, then growing to realize they were all that mattered and composed 90 percent of your entire being.”
― Emma Straub, All Adults Here

“What a very long time one had to be an adult, after rushing through childhood and adolescence. There should be several more distinctions: the idiocy of the young twenties, when one was suddenly expected to know how to do adult things; the panicked coupling of the mid- and late twenties, when marriages happened as quickly as a game of tag; the sitcom mom period, when you finally had enough food in your freezer to survive for a month if necessary; the school principal period, when you were no longer seen as a woman at all but just a nagging authority figure. If you were lucky, there was the late-in-life sexy Mrs. Robinson period, or an accomplished and powerful Meryl Streep period, followed, of course, by approximately two decades of old crone-hood, like the woman at the end of 'Titanic”
― Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“Once Charles arrived, Franny would start laughing the way she had when she was twenty-four, and the rest of them could start setting one another on fire for all she cared. That’s what best friends did: ruin people for everyone else.”
― Emma Straub, The Vacationers

“Parents knew that the hardest part of parenthood was figuring out how to do the right thing twenty-four hours a day, forever, and surviving all the times you failed.”
― Emma Straub, All Adults Here

“Choices were easy to make until you realized how long life could be.”
― Emma Straub, Modern Lovers

“What a very long time one had to be an adult, after rushing through childhood and adolescence.”
― Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“A good swimming pool could do that—make the rest of the world seem impossibly insignificant, as far away as the surface of the moon.”
― Emma Straub, The Vacationers

“When she was young, she’d thought he was old, and now that he was old, Alice realized how young he’d been. Perspective was unfair.”
― Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

“So much of being a good friend was knowing when to keep your mouth shut.”
― Emma Straub, The Vacationers

“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, This Time Tomorrow