Emma Straub Quotes

Leaving. That was the word she liked to use. Not going away, which implied a return, but leaving, which implied a jet plane.

If the Enchanted Forest were in a movie, they'd always be playing Bob Dylan or Van Morrison or maybe even Leonard Cohen in the background. Greta thought about that a lot. Sometimes when she was taking a shower or helping her mom in the restaurant, she'd imagine what kind of scene it would be and what would be playing to set the mood.

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.

A good boy almost all of the time, as well behaved as a loyal hound

Teenagers and younger children did not need to sit in business class, let alone first - that was Franny's philosophy. The extra room was for people who could appreciate it, truly appreciate it, and she did.

Laura was going to sew herself into the shape of happiness all on her own.

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.

It seemed like folly to imagine that one could fill a house (or a tent) with relatives and still expect to have a pleasant vacation.

Maybe that was the key to all good relationships, having oceans of time apart.

Maybe that was the answer to good parenting - pretending the first child was the second.

the major accomplishment of her life was producing two children who seemed to like each other even when no one else was looking,

... She might have thought that it was the case, that all things worked out in the end, and that the world was a benevolent place, but she knew better now, and had to fake it.

Andi Teran's first novel is vivid and fully realized, an entire universe expertly condensed into the pages you hold in your hands. Ana herself is a complicated delight, and by the end of the book I wanted to scoop her up into my arms.

There was no excuse, except for the excuse that perfection was impossible, and failure inevitable.

It was the most beautiful dress Harry had ever seen. It wasn't just a dress; it was a religion.

When the kids were little, she and Zoe had been friends with another mom in the neighborhood, and this lady's kid was so horrible that they both mentioned it to her, that he seemed like a miniature serial killer in training, and she stopped speaking to them. Pretty soon she moved out of the neighborhood, and Elizabeth guessed it was to move closer to whatever prison facility her son was bound to wind up in. People just didn't want to hear it.

She wanted the world to stop and take notice before hobbling forward, forever changed. The problem was that no one seemed to be changed but her.

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.

They were just wading through the muck like everyone else.

That was another thing Ruby would miss about New York, if she were leaving: she's miss how much space people gave you. You could have a fucking sobbing fit on the subway and no one would mess with you. You could barf in a garbage can on the street corner and no one would mess with you. If you were giving off invisible vibes, people respected that. People thought New Yorkers were rude, but really they were just leaving you to your own stuff. It was respectful! In a city with so many people, a New Yorker would always pretend not to see you when you didn't want to be seen.

Kids are forever, even if love isn't, right?

The Internet was excellent for confirming one's worst fears about the human race.

to be a hypocrite or a liar? Jim wasn't

It was crazy, what young people believed was possible, what so many earnest twenty-three-year-olds took for granted about the rest of their lives.

Taylor Swift had probably slept with more people than she had, and good for her.

Islands, being harder to get to, naturally separated some of the wheat from the chaff, which was the entire philosophy behind places like Nantucket, where children grew up feeling entitled to private beaches and loud pants.

But there was no way that any man would ever have typed up a list of instructions and usual information for his home, unless of course he were being paid to do so. It was the kind of thoughtful touch that only women were intrinsically capable of, no matter what any quack therapist on television said.

Franny liked this moment most of all: being alone in the kitchen after almost everything was finished, and listening to the assembled guests chatting happily, knowing they were soon to be fed.

Elizabeth ran her finger along the windowsill, gathering dust. The view was almost exactly the same as from her own bedroom, only a few degrees shifted. She could still see the Rosens' place, with its red door and folding shutters, and the Martinez house, with its porch swing and the dog bowl. She'd heard once that what made you a real New Yorker was when you could remember back three laters -- the place on the corner that had been a bakery and then a barbershop before it was a cell-phone store, or the restaurant that had been Italian, then Mexican, then Cuban. The city was a palimpsest, a Mod Podged pileup or old signage and other people's failures. Newcomers saw only what was in front of them, but people who had been there long enough were always looking at two or three other places simultaneously. The IRT, Canal Jeans, the Limelight. So much of the city she'd fallen in love with was gone, but then again, that's how it worked. It was your job to remember. At least the bridges were still there. Some things were too heavy to take down.

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

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.

... She was as beautiful and lost as a landlocked mermaid.

Families were nothing more than hope cast out in a wide net, everyone wanting only the best.

There was nothing about youth that was fair: the young hadn't done anything to deserve it, and the old hadn't done anything to drive it away.

It's about you. I always thought that you would need some time, you know, to grow up, but I think I just realized that it's never going to happen, not while I'm sitting around waiting for it.

No on thought that they would be anything more or less than perfectly fine.

Me tienen hasta los huevos. It means I've had it up to my balls.

Having a daughter whose company he actually enjoyed was one of Jim's favorite accomplishments. The odds were against you, in all matters of family planning. You couldn't choose to have a boy or a girl; you couldn't choose to have a child who favored you over the other parent. You could only accept what came along naturally...

Dogs were gloriously uncomplicated creatures - food and play and sleep and love, that was all they needed.

Parenthood is the only job that gets progressively harder every single year, and you never, ever, ever get a raise.

If I'd had a friend next to me, I would have squeezed her arm and said, Can you believe this? - but kitsch wasn't kitsch if you were alone.

So much of being a good friend was knowing when to keep your mouth shut.

Like most things, sex got better with age until one hit a certain plateau, and then it was like breakfast, unlikely to change unless one ran out of milk and was forced to improvise.

They were with their mother, and so they were acting like children.

It glowed in the mid-morning sunlight, the black shutters on the open windows eyelashes on a beautiful face.

Why couldn't everyone stay young forever? If not on the outside, then just on the inside, where no one ever got too old to be optimistic.