Top 500 Liane Moriarty Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “Dying was such an elegant way to leave a relationship. No infidelity, no boredom, no long, complicated conversations late into the night. No “She’s still single, I hear.” No running into each other at parties and weddings. No “She’s stacked on the weight” or “She’s showing her age.” Dying was final and mysterious and gave you the last word forever.”

— Liane Moriarty

212. “She felt detached from all aspects of her life. She had no time anymore to feel. All that time she used to waste feeling, and analyzing her feelings, as if they were a matter of national significance.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

214. “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

215. “Did she love him as much as she hated him? Did she hate him as much as she loved him?”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

217. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

220. “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

221. “It’s no big deal. It is a big deal. They have no right to make you feel that way. Or, just ignore it, one day you’ll turn forty and you’ll slowly realize you don’t feel the eyes anymore, and the freedom is a relief, but you’ll also sort of miss it, and when a truck driver whistles at you while you’re crossing the road, you’ll think, Really? For me?”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

236. “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

237. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

239. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

241. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

248. “But Grace quite likes the fact that you can think something is one way all your life, and it turns out you’re wrong, it can be something else entirely. It makes her feel free. Nothing is rigid. Things change. You can change your mind. You can change your thinking.”

— Liane Moriarty

249. “Now it seemed like she could twist the lens on her life and see it from two entirely different perspectives. The perspective of her younger self. Her younger, sillier, innocent self. And her older, wiser, more cynical and sensible self.”

— Liane Moriarty

250. “What are you babbling on about, woman?” sighed Chloe. She’d picked this phrase up from her father and imitated his weary tone perfectly. They’d made the mistake of laughing the first time she did it, so she’d kept it up, and said it just often enough, and with perfect timing, so that they couldn’t help but keep laughing.”

— Liane Moriarty