Top 450 Liane Moriarty Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “One of the multitudes of exboyfriends had been a country music fan and left Gemma with an unfortunate passion for Tammy Wynette. It was like, Cat thought, he’d given her herpes.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

206. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

217. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

236. “Doing this always calmed her. It was like imagining the protective walls of an impenetrable fortress. She.”

— Liane Moriarty

237. “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

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. “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

240. “This was historical revisionism at its best, and hadn’t Sam always specialized in that, hadn’t she always said she wished she had a permanent film rolling of their life so she could go back and prove that, yes, he did so say that thing he now denied?”

— Liane Moriarty

241. “Once, she’d loved to receive flowers. Now it was like being handed a series of tasks: Find the vase. Cut the stems. Arrange them like so.”

— Liane Moriarty

242. “She didn’t come from old money or new money but from never-quite-enough money.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

244. “The gym? Alice didn’t go to gyms. Had she woken up drunk in a gym?”

— Liane Moriarty

245. “Try not to saddle yourself with too distinct a personality too early in life. It might not suit you later on.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

247. “That was the irony: Her mother loved things so much that she had nothing.”

— Liane Moriarty

248. “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

249. “Madeline, she realized, was one of those slightly dangerous people who jumped right in defending their friends and stirred up far bigger waves than the first tiny ripple.”

— Liane Moriarty

250. “Little things I do start to annoy him. He gets a bit irritable. I try to placate him. I start walking on eggshells, but at the same time I’m angry that I have to walk on eggshells, so sometimes I stop tiptoeing. I stomp on the eggshells. I deliberately aggravate him because I’m so angry with him, and with myself, for having to be careful. And then it happens again.”

— Liane Moriarty