Top 500 Liane Moriarty Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 4 of 10

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

154. “She’d been lacking in so much confidence when she was a teenager, worrying all the time about what people thought of her and how they might hurt her, without even considering the impact she might have on their feelings.”

— Liane Moriarty

155. “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

156. “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

157. “My point is that things become weird and pointless if you examine them for too long.”

— Liane Moriarty

158. “No one could be expected to give up wine and books at the same time.”

— Liane Moriarty

159. “Mothers took their mothering so seriously now. Their frantic little faces. Their busy little bottoms strutting into the school in their tight gym gear. Ponytails swinging. Eyes fixed on the mobile phones held in the palms of their hands like compasses.”

— Liane Moriarty

160. “Once, when Nick, Alice, and Elisabeth went away for a weekend together, Elisabeth spent ages at the breakfast table studying the “nutritional information” panel on the side of a container of yogurt, warning them darkly, “You have to be really careful with yogurt.” Whenever Nick and Alice ate yogurt after that, one of them would always shout, “Careful!”

— Liane Moriarty

161. “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

162. “Samantha: Parents do tend to judge each other. I don’t know why. Maybe because none of us really know what we’re doing? And I guess that can sometimes lead to conflict. Just not normally on this sort of scale.”

— Liane Moriarty

163. “Heather had grown up starved of love, and when you’re starved of something you should receive in abundance, you never quite trust it.”

— Liane Moriarty

164. “Women and their bodies! The most abusive and toxic of relationships. Masha had seen women pinch at the flesh of their stomachs with such brutal self-loathing they left bruises. Meanwhile their husbands fondly patted their own much larger stomachs with rueful pride.”

— Liane Moriarty

165. “She had not realised that grief was so physical. Before Zach died, she thought grief happened in your head. She didn’t know that your whole body ached with it, that it screwed up your digestive system, your menstrual cycle, your sleep patterns, your skin. You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy.”

— Liane Moriarty

166. “It shouldn’t matter. She knew it shouldn’t matter. But 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. This was what a woman was meant to look like. Exactly this.”

— Liane Moriarty

167. “Nancy always made Clementine think of that Gore Vidal quote: ‘Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”

— Liane Moriarty

168. “Only a man could come up with something so ruthless, so essentially stupid and yet brutally effective.”

— Liane Moriarty

169. “Nobody ever told you that being a mother is all about making what seemed like thousands of tiny decisions.”

— Liane Moriarty

170. “Their children had bound them together in a way that she knew didn’t always happen to other couples. Sharing stories about their children – laughing about them, wondering about their futures – was one of the greatest pleasures of her marriage. She’d married John-Paul because of the father she knew he would one day be.”

— Liane Moriarty

171. “She enjoyed being told off by them. She could hear the rhythms of her own voice, her mother’s voice, her grandmother’s voice, every relieved cranky woman from the beginning of time.”

— Liane Moriarty

172. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

174. “Carmel experienced another burst of euphoria. She might have lost a husband, but she got herself a wife. An efficient, energetic young wife. What a bargain. What an upgrade.”

— Liane Moriarty

175. “Why did people feel the need to comment on the rain, when they had absolutely nothing of value to add to the conversation?”

— Liane Moriarty

176. “The house was literally perfect now. Instead of being thrilling, that suddenly seemed depressing.”

— Liane Moriarty

177. “It’s about making a choice to make your marriage a priority, to, kind of, put that at the top of the page, as your mission statement or something.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

179. “There was no point saying, You mustn’t feel responsible. Of course she felt responsible. Denying her regret would be like denying her loss.”

— Liane Moriarty

180. “Erika, because she had no experience of it, and because part of her would always believe that visitors were to be feared and despised.”

— Liane Moriarty

181. “He could find hatred in his heart for her, too, if he went looking for it. The secret of a happy marriage was not to go looking for it.”

— Liane Moriarty

182. “Only those who have feared they will lose everything feel true gratitude for their lucky lives.”

— Liane Moriarty

183. “She’d looked at the stubble along his jawline, and the thought had crossed her mind: He looks like Clark Kent, but maybe he’s really Superman.”

— Liane Moriarty

184. “Veronika had accused her father of being a misogynist and Thomas had told Veronika to stop acting like a pseudo lesbian intellectual.”

— Liane Moriarty

185. “You’re allowed to grieve your loss even if it’s embarrassing.”

— Liane Moriarty

186. “They lost Olivia at Newport Beach. The panic made Alice hyperventilate. You were meant to be watching her, Nick kept saying. As if that were the point. That Alice had made a mistake. Not that Olivia was missing, but that it was Alice’s fault.”

— Liane Moriarty

187. “There was a lot of kissing of both cheeks in 2008.”

— Liane Moriarty

188. “She just needed to think about it. Today she had the ‘emergency’ session with her psychologist. Maybe that would get things clearer in her mind. So much to cover at today’s session! She might need to bring along an agenda. That wouldn’t make her look like a Type A personality at all. Not that Erika had a problem with being type A. Why would you want to be any other personality type?”

— Liane Moriarty

189. “Cecilia didn’t care what the fine print said about free will and God’s mysterious ways and blahdy-blah. If God had a supervisor, she would have sent off one of her famous letters of complaint a long time ago. “You have lost me as a customer.”

— Liane Moriarty

190. “When someone you loved was depending on your lie, it was perfectly easy.”

— Liane Moriarty

191. “How do you make a man do something without nagging?” “That,” said Madeline, “is the billion-dollar question.”

— Liane Moriarty

192. “You’ll be fine,” said Jane, giving.”

— Liane Moriarty

193. “Relationships don’t stay the same. There isn’t time.”

— Liane Moriarty

194. “I never believed I was going to have a baby until I heard her cry.”

— Liane Moriarty

195. “How horrible it was to be despised. To feel yourself to be despicable.”

— Liane Moriarty

196. “Cat felt that sense of pleasure and pride that she always felt when she saw her sisters in public. “Look at them!” she wanted to say to people. “My sisters. Aren’t they great? Aren’t they annoying?”

— Liane Moriarty

197. “Jab, jab, truce! This, it seems, is marriage–.”

— Liane Moriarty

198. “Where was the “exit” sign? Why did they make it so difficult to get out of shopping center parking lots? You’d done your shopping – they weren’t going to get any more money out of you. What was their objective here?”

— Liane Moriarty

199. “If she was handing over a slice of her heart, she wanted the exact same size given back in return. Actually, she really preferred a bigger piece, thank you very much.”

— Liane Moriarty

200. “If her back had ever hurt like this when she was twenty she would have been hysterical, demanding painkillers and cups of tea in bed, but she has found that nobody is especially surprised to hear you’re in pain when you’re in your eighties. You might find it astonishing, but nobody else does.”

— Liane Moriarty