Top 450 Liane Moriarty Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “My husband hits me, Renata. Never on the face of course. He’s far too classy for that. Does yours hit you?”

— Liane Moriarty

102. “Renata and Harper attended the same weekly support group for parents of gifted children. Madeline imagined them all sitting in a circle, wringing their hands while their eyes shone with secret pride.”

— Liane Moriarty

103. “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

104. “Their arguments always went like this. The angrier Madeline got, the more freakishly calm Ed became, until he reached a point where he sounded like a hostage negotiator dealing with a lunatic and a ticking bomb. It was infuriating.”

— Liane Moriarty

105. “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

106. “All that we are is a result of what we have thought. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.”

— Liane Moriarty

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “She couldn’t shake the feeling that if she didn’t record this moment on her phone then it wasn’t really happening, it didn’t count.”

— Liane Moriarty

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— 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. “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

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. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

141. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

143. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

145. “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

146. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

149. “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

150. “Everyone knew that a stolen kiss was the most erotic thing in the world.”

— Liane Moriarty