“She’d read all of Jane Austen that year—Austen was good, but when you told people you liked Pride and Prejudice, they expected you to be all sunshine and wedding veils, and Sylvia preferred the rainy moors. The Brontës weren’t afraid… — Emma Straub Copy Share Image
“Now whenever Franny or Jim spoke to someone who kept a car in Manhattan, they reacted with quiet horror, like people who’d been subjected… — Emma Straub Copy Share Image
“There was nothing in life harder or more important than agreeing every morning to stay the course, to go back to your forgotten self… — Emma Straub Copy Share Image
“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… — Emma Straub Copy Share Image
“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… — Emma Straub Copy Share Image
“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… — Emma Straub Copy Share Image
“What were parents anyway, except two people who had once thought they were the smartest people in the world? They were a delusional species,… — Emma Straub Copy Share Image
“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… — Emma Straub Copy Share Image
“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… — Emma Straub Copy Share Image
“Elizabeth was happy in her marriage, she really was. It was just that sometimes she thought about all the experiences she’d never gotten to have, and all the nights she’d listened to the sound of her husband’s snores, and wanted to jump out a window and go home with the first person who talked to her. Choices were easy to… — Emma Straub Copy Share
“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.” — Emma Straub Copy Share Image
“...all she wanted was a button she could push to pause her age, just for a little while, a few years, while she got… — Emma Straub Copy Share Image
