Top 500 Liane Moriarty Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “They both went to opposite sides of the bed, snapped on their bedside lamps and pulled back the cover in a smooth, practiced, synchronized move that proved, depending on Madeline’s mood, that they either had the perfect marriage or that they were stuck in a middle-class suburban rut and they needed to sell the house and go traveling around India.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

206. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “Sometimes they purposely asked people over just to give themselves the incentive to clean up in a frantic rush before they arrived.”

— Liane Moriarty

212. “Parents take far too much notice of their children these days. Bring back the good old days of benign indifference, I reckon.”

— Liane Moriarty

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

217. “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

218. “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

219. “Men often used that phrase: “drop some weight.” They said it without shame or emotion, as if the weight were an object they could easily put down when they chose. Women said they needed to “lose weight,” with their eyes down, as if the extra weight was part of them, a terrible sin they’d committed.”

— Liane Moriarty

220. “Even after all these years, she still said the word “gig” self-consciously, in the same way that she always said “croissant” with the proper French pronunciation, but with an apologetic, self-deprecating look to make up for her pretentiousness.”

— Liane Moriarty

221. “Or maybe temporary insanity is just an excuse for inexcusable behavior.”

— Liane Moriarty

222. “Perry was away often. He sometimes felt like an aberration in her life. A visitor. Her real life took place when he wasn’t there. What happened never mattered all that much because he was always about to leave, the next day or the next week.”

— Liane Moriarty

223. “He’d be fine. Every child went to school. They survived. They learned the rules of life.”

— Liane Moriarty

224. “There were moments when she thought she might survive. And there were other moments when she would catch herself thinking about her life as if it was a party she couldn’t wait to leave.”

— Liane Moriarty

225. “It was always like that. They never said sorry. They just threw down their still-loaded weapons, ready for next time.”

— Liane Moriarty

226. “The sky looks comfortingly mundane compared to the garish kaleidoscope of the stained glass. It makes Rose yearn to be reliving any one of a thousand ordinary days spent with her ordinary older sister, who has now done this extraordinary thing and died.”

— Liane Moriarty

227. “The cycles of dysfunction and mental illness did not have to carry over from generation to generation. You just had to educate yourself. Erika.”

— Liane Moriarty

228. “If parents had children who were good sleepers, they assumed this was due to their good parenting, not good luck. They followed the rules, and the rules had been proven to work.”

— Liane Moriarty

229. “She’d once been appalled to hear of women claiming PMS as a defense for murder. Now she understood. She could happily murder someone today! In fact, she felt like there should be some sort of recognition for her remarkable strength of character that she didn’t.”

— Liane Moriarty

230. “She longed to feel something momentous. Sometimes her life seemed so little.”

— Liane Moriarty

231. “There are so many secrets about our lives we’ll never know.”

— Liane Moriarty

232. “Sometimes it felt like all the people in her life were scavengers, pecking viciously away at her flesh, wanting more, more, more.”

— Liane Moriarty

233. “They probably felt like it was the end of the world. But it turned out to be the making of them. The lowest point of your life can lead to the highest.”

— Liane Moriarty

234. “Why hadn’t that been part of his stupid lifelong redemption program: Do what my wife asks immediately so she doesn’t feel like a nag.”

— Liane Moriarty

235. “Even really horrible children probably looked beautiful when they slept.”

— Liane Moriarty

236. “As seductive as it might have been to erase the grief and pain of the last ten years, it was also a lie. Young Alice was a fool. A sweet, innocent fool. Young Alice hadn’t experienced ten years of living.”

— Liane Moriarty

237. “He liked his friends, but he had no interest in hearing their personal problems and he therefore couldn’t share his own. He.”

— Liane Moriarty

238. “But she was so proud of Nick’s uninhibited sociability, the way he could walk straight into a party full of people they didn’t know and stick his hand out to a stranger and say, “I’m Nick. This is my wife, Alice.” It was as though he had an amazing skill, like playing a complicated musical instrument, that Alice could never hope to master.”

— Liane Moriarty

239. “Recently, she’d noticed something strange happening when she talked to people in groups. She couldn’t quite remember how to be. She’d find herself thinking: Did I just laugh too loudly? Did I forget to laugh? Did I just repeat myself?”

— Liane Moriarty

240. “That was kind of a joke. It gave her hope for the night that he was making a joke. Sam had been the first man she ever dated who immediately and instinctively grasped the complexities of her friendship with Erika. He’d never reacted with impatience or incomprehension; he’d never said, ‘I don’t get it, if you don’t like her, don’t hang out with her!’ He’d just accepted Erika as part of the Clementine package, as if she were a difficult sister.”

— Liane Moriarty

241. “Nothing and nobody could aggravate you the way your child could aggravate you.”

— Liane Moriarty

242. “There just wasn’t enough time in 2008. It had become a limited resource. Back in 1998, the days were so much more spacious. When she woke up in the morning, the day rolled out in front of her like a long hallway for her to meander down, free to linger over the best parts. Days were so stingy now. Mean slivers of time. They flew by like speeding cars. Whoosh! When she was pulling back the blankets to hop into bed each night, it felt as if only seconds ago.”

— Liane Moriarty

243. “Elderly women were as tough as nails but it seemed that men got softer as they aged; their emotions caught them off guard, as if some protective barrier had been worn away by time.”

— Liane Moriarty

244. “Apparently, moving back home was just like joining Facebook, when middle-aged ex-boyfriends came crawling out of the woodwork like cockroaches, suggesting drinks, putting out their nasty little feelers for potential affairs.”

— Liane Moriarty

245. “Alice thought of poor Hillary Clinton. Imagine having the whole world know that your husband had cheated on you in such a messy way. You would have thought being president of the United States should have been a pretty distracting sort of job.”

— Liane Moriarty

246. “Opinions were for other people. It was fascinating how upset they got about them.”

— Liane Moriarty

247. “You never changed your appearance for men. You changed it for other women. Because they were the ones carefully tracking each others weight and skin tone along with their own. They were the ones trapped with you on the ridiculous appearance obsession merry go round that they couldn’t or wouldn’t get off.”

— Liane Moriarty

248. “But women like Tess didn’t seem to have that need to share the ordinary facts of their lives, and that made Cecilia desperate to know them.”

— Liane Moriarty

249. “She felt as though she’d been unforgivably negligent – careless! sloppy! – with the most precious, wonderful gift she’d ever received.”

— Liane Moriarty

250. “Oh, Lord. Tess could feel her entire personality being drained from her body. Those talkative, energetic people always left her feeling that way.”

— Liane Moriarty