Top 450 Liane Moriarty Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 10

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

— Liane Moriarty

152. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

154. “You mustn’t take any notice of her,’ says Enigma. ‘I often sing a little song in my head until she’s finished talking.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

156. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “She’d noticed before how middle-aged women were obsessed with the topic of age, always laughing about it, moaning about it, going on and on about it, as if the process of aging were a tricky puzzle they were trying to solve. Why were they so mystified by it?”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

177. “Alice said once that she’d never been appalled by anything. Elisabeth said that was appalling.”

— Liane Moriarty

178. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

180. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

182. “For a moment Tess felt her strange, inappropriate happiness teeter. It was as though she were balanced on a narrow crevice surrounded by chasms of grief. One wrong thought and down she’d tumble.”

— Liane Moriarty

183. “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

184. “He made her happy and maede her laugh. She still enjoyed talking with him, watching TV with him, lying in bed with him on cold, rainy mornings. She still wanted him.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

186. “If he could just have one more chance, he’d act like the man he’d always believed himself to be.”

— Liane Moriarty

187. “Sometimes when she looked at him, she felt like there was a sleeping snake tightly coiled within her chest, a snake that would one day hiss to life and strike with unimaginable, unforgivable consequences.”

— Liane Moriarty

188. “Somehow she knew there would be an unspoken truce on their unspoken battle over God knew what when they were old. They could both surrender to their innate grumpiness. It was going to be a lovely relief.”

— Liane Moriarty

189. “What if I was! That’s my point. What if I was a bit overweight and not especially pretty? Why is that so terrible? So disgusting? Why is that the end of the world?”

— Liane Moriarty

190. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

192. “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

193. “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

194. “All of a sudden she thought she had all the time in the world. Pride comes before someone trips you flat on your face.”

— Liane Moriarty

195. “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

196. “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

197. “You think love is black and white. All women think that. And they’re wrong. Women are really intelligent except for when they’re being really stupid.”

— Liane Moriarty

198. “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

199. “But the memory stayed, clinging to the walls of her mind like a slimy black leech.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty