All Adults Here
Emma Straub
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“There was no excuse, except for the excuse that perfection was impossible, and failure inevitable.”
“It wasn’t fair when people moved away—they took so much of you with them, without even meaning to.”
“Astrid was surprised they still taught J. D. Salinger in school—he had slept with a teenager, hadn’t he? They should just be reading Toni Morrison. It seemed so easy, to cut out the creeps and sexual predators, just by cutting out all the men. Sure, you’d lose some decent people, but the net result would be so positive, who would complain?”
“Maybe it was a blessing of childhood that most people couldn’t remember much before they were five—what good would it do to remember life as a savage toddler, totally divorced from societal norms? It was as if each human evolved from being a chimpanzee in a single lifetime. No one wanted to remember the jungle.”
“Being an adult was like always growing new layers of skin, trying to fool yourself that the bones underneath were different too.”
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Book Keywords:
adulthood, family, generations, alone-but-not-lonely, failure, parenting, perfection
