Top 450 Liane Moriarty Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “This was not the career she’d dreamed of as an ambitious seventeen-year-old, but now it was hard to remember ever feeling innocent and audacious enough to dream of a certain type of life, as if you got to choose how things turned out.”

— Liane Moriarty

102. “He’s the first person I want to tell when somebody upsets me; my foot pressing on the accelerator, desperate to get home from work just to tell him, the moment I tell him, the moment his face lights up with fury on my behalf, it’s better, it’s fixed.”

— Liane Moriarty

103. “It’s kind of devastating.” She paused. “And, Madeline, it infuriates me that I found it so devastating. It infuriates me that he had that power over me. I look in the mirror each day, and I think, ‘I’m not overweight anymore,’ but he’s right, I’m still ugly. Intellectually I know I’m not ugly, I’m perfectly acceptable. But I feel ugly, because one man said it was so, and that made it so. It’s pathetic.”

— Liane Moriarty

104. “The bills would keep on coming, no matter what else was happening in your life and that was good because it gave you a purpose. You worked so you could pay them. You rested on the weekends and generated more bills. Then you went back to work to pay for them. That was the reason for getting up tomorrow. That was the meaning of life.”

— Liane Moriarty

105. “Life was all about consequences.”

— Liane Moriarty

106. “Perhaps all grown-ups were just children carefully putting on their grown-up disguises each day and then acting accordingly.”

— Liane Moriarty

107. “People thought that tragedy made you wise, that it automatically elevated you to a higher, spiritual level, but it seemed to Rachel that just the opposite was true. Tragedy made you petty and spiteful. It didn’t give you any great knowledge or insight. She didn’t understand a damned thing about life except that it was arbitrary and cruel, and some people got away with murder, while others made one tiny careless mistake and paid a terrible price.”

— Liane Moriarty

108. “You shouldn’t only be nice to nice people.”

— Liane Moriarty

109. “It sometimes seemed so peculiar and so wrong that you could be that intimate with someone, to go to sleep with him and wake up with him, to do really quite extraordinarily personal things together on a regular basis, and then, suddenly, you don’t even know his telephone number, or where he’s living or working, or what he did today or last week or last year.”

— Liane Moriarty

110. “But then there were the other times, unexpected quiet moments, where they’d catch each other’s eyes, and all the years of hurt and joy, bad times and good times, seemed to fuse into a feeling that she knew was so much stronger, more complex and real, than of those fledgling feelings for Dominick, or even the love she’d first felt for Nick in those early years.”

— Liane Moriarty

111. “If she packaged the perfect Facebook life, maybe she would start to believe it herself.”

— Liane Moriarty

112. “Stick with the nice boys, Chloe!” said Madeline after a moment. “Like Daddy. Bad boys don’t bring you coffee in bed, I’ll tell you that for free.”

— Liane Moriarty

113. “When you divorce someone, you divorce their whole family, Madeline had told her once.”

— Liane Moriarty

114. “Madison rolled her eyes. “No. I won’t care if people say mean things to me, because I’ll be grown up. I can just say, ‘Who cares? I’m going to France.’ ” Ah.”

— Liane Moriarty

115. “Overtired five-year-olds needed to be handled like explosive devices.”

— Liane Moriarty

116. “She had always had a slight mistrust of busy people; the sort of people who described themselves as ‘Flat-out Frantic!’ What was the hurry? Why didn’t they just slow down? Just what exactly were they so busy doing?”

— Liane Moriarty

117. “It drove her to distraction the way women wanted to bond over self-hatred.”

— Liane Moriarty

118. “He was comfortable in any social situation: garden party or cage fighting contest, it was all the same to Vid, it was all interesting.”

— Liane Moriarty

119. “Don’t let your heart be a casualty of your head.” She wanted Masha to understand that her state of mind was just as important as the state of her body.”

— Liane Moriarty

120. “Your inferiority was right there on display for the world to see.”

— Liane Moriarty

121. “She wondered if it was similar to how people felt when they first took antidepressants and they lost their pain, but everything else felt muted too: flatter, duller.”

— Liane Moriarty

122. “Stay still. Stop talking. Stop wanting. Just be. You’ll hear it, or feel it. Close your eyes and you’ll see it.”

— Liane Moriarty

123. “He got Alice, the way we did, or maybe even more so than us. He made her more confident, funnier, smarter. He brought out all the things that were there already and let her be fully herself, so she seemed to shine with this inner light.”

— Liane Moriarty

124. “I don’t get the obsession with strangers, her first husband, Sol, once said to her, and Frances had struggled to explain that strangers were by definition interesting. It was their strangeness. The not-knowing. Once you knew everything there was to know about someone, you were generally ready to divorce them.”

— Liane Moriarty

125. “She quite liked this aspect of her personality, the way her mood could change from melancholy to euphoric because of a breeze or a flavor or a beautiful chord progression. It meant she never had to feel too down about feeling down.”

— Liane Moriarty

126. “Once you’ve hit a ball there’s no point watching to see where it’s going. You can’t change its flight path now. You have to think about your next move. Not what you should have done. What you do now.”

— Liane Moriarty

127. “This Thursday night felt like adolescence: exquisitely painful and sharply beautiful.”

— Liane Moriarty

128. “Abigail is having a ‘beautiful experience’ with Bonnie at the homeless shelter,” Madeline said to Ed. Ed took his pillow off his face. “That’s revolting,” he said. “I know,” said Madeline. This is why she loved him.”

— Liane Moriarty

129. “There was nothing wrong with the color. He’d call back the next day and say it was fine. He’d just needed to feel powerful for a few minutes. One of the younger hotshots had just made him feel inferior in a meeting.”

— Liane Moriarty

130. “Just when I discovered the meaning of life, they changed it. George Carlin.”

— Liane Moriarty

131. “She was busy thinking about the concept of forgiveness. It was such a lovely, generous idea when it wasn’t linked to something awful that needed forgiving.”

— Liane Moriarty

132. “Sometimes your life changes so slowly and imperceptibly that you don’t notice it at all until one day you wake up and think: How did I get here?”

— Liane Moriarty

133. “Two musicians could play the same notes and sound entirely different. Intonation was everything.”

— Liane Moriarty

134. “He was a selfish, pompous, egocentric, nasty man. She did not want to be married to him, but she did not want him to marry someone else. She did not want him, but she wanted him to want her.”

— Liane Moriarty

135. “The problem is that Sophie would’t want to date the sort of man who would want to date her.”

— Liane Moriarty

136. “It’s amazing how friends can slip through your fingers, how your social network can vanish like it never existed.”

— Liane Moriarty

137. “That was the day Alice Mary Love went to the gym and carelessly misplaced a decade of her life.”

— Liane Moriarty

138. “Every time I ask her to explain her job, I forget to listen.”

— Liane Moriarty

139. “You can still bake a perfectly good cake while losing your mind.”

— Liane Moriarty

140. “Her goodness had limits. She could have easily gone her whole life without knowing those limits, but now she knew exactly where they lay.”

— Liane Moriarty

141. “Baths, she thought, were just like her relationships, all “ooh, ah” in the beginning and then suddenly, without warning, she had to get out, out, out!”

— Liane Moriarty

142. “First kisses didn’t necessarily require darkness and alcohol, they could happen in the open air, with the sun warm on your face and everything around you honest and real and true.”

— Liane Moriarty

143. “Obstacles cannot crush me; every obstacle yields to stern resolve.”

— Liane Moriarty

144. “You are awful people,” she said loudly. The Blond Bobs looked up. Their eyes and mouths were little ovals of surprise. “You are awful, awful people.”

— Liane Moriarty

145. “There was no such thing as a good divorce for children.”

— Liane Moriarty

146. “The fact was that some people were so unacceptably, hurtfully, beautiful, it made you feel ashamed. Your inferiority was right there on display for the world to see.”

— Liane Moriarty

147. “She didn’t want to admit, even to herself, just how much the aging of her face really did genuinely depress her. She wanted to be above such superficial concerns. She wanted to be depressed about the state of the world, not the crumpling and creasing of her skin. Each time she saw evidence of the natural aging of her body, she felt irrationally ashamed, as if she weren’t trying hard enough.”

— Liane Moriarty

148. “Anyway, weren’t women allowed to be sexist for the next two thousand years or so, until they’d evened up the score?”

— Liane Moriarty

149. “She thought everyone had friends who felt like obligations.”

— Liane Moriarty

150. “Your child was a little stranger, constantly changing, disappearing and reintroducing himself to you.”

— Liane Moriarty