Top 450 Liane Moriarty Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 10

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

203. “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

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. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

208. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

236. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

239. “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

240. “Looking after the baby is like taking some sort of terrifying, never-ending practical exam. All she does is respond to what the baby is doing. Feed baby. Change baby. Wash baby. Keep baby alive. Prepare for when baby wakes again.”

— Liane Moriarty

241. “Your daughters will leave this school as confident, resilient young women.” Ms. Byrne was off, delivering the private school party line. Resilience. What crap. No kid was going to go to school in a place that looked like freaking Buckingham Palace and come out of it resilient. She should be honest: “Your daughter will leave this school with a grand sense of entitlement that will serve her well in life; she’ll find it especially useful on Sydney roads.”

— Liane Moriarty

242. “It wasn’t her dream job, but she did quite enjoy the satisfaction of transforming a messy pile of paperwork into neat rows of figures.”

— Liane Moriarty

243. “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

244. “You’re like a favorite pillow. I have to pack you wherever I go.”

— Liane Moriarty

245. “He hadn’t left her for something better, but for something new.”

— Liane Moriarty

246. “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

247. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

249. “Her mother could always charm her, even at the worst times. Just when Erika thought she was done, that was it, she could take no more, her mother charmed her back into loving her. Her.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty