Top 450 Liane Moriarty Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “You weren’t meant to admit, even to yourself, how badly you wanted love. The man was meant to be the icing, not the cake.”

— Liane Moriarty

262. “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

263. “We were so happy.”

— Liane Moriarty

264. “Nobody felt embarrassed in front of nice geeky people. That’s why they were relaxing to be around.”

— Liane Moriarty

265. “But if the girls hadn’t got their knickers in a knot, and that might sound sexist but it’s not, it’s just a fact of life, ask any man, not some new age, artsy-fartsy, I-wear-moisturiser type, I mean a real man, ask a real man, then he’ll tell you that women are like the Olympic athletes of grudges.”

— Liane Moriarty

266. “Why weren’t they just overcome with joy every time they looked at those kids? Why in the world were they divorcing?”

— Liane Moriarty

267. “I understand now that desperate, clumsy desire to make people feel better – even when you know perfectly well that nothing will.”

— Liane Moriarty

268. “Sometimes she felt like she was always dragging the memories of these relationships along with her, like three old tin cans on a string.”

— Liane Moriarty

269. “The only woman who deserved a philandering husband was a philandering wife.”

— Liane Moriarty

270. “Raising awareness. It’s a good thing. Makes people think twice.”

— Liane Moriarty

271. “There’s a new Alice in town,” said Alice. “You’re not wrong about that.” Nick seemed about to say something. He stopped and looked over her shoulder. “Here comes our little thug.”

— Liane Moriarty

272. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

274. “It wasn’t logical, but the better you knew someone, the more blurry they became. The accumulation of facts made them disappear.”

— Liane Moriarty

275. “It was interesting how you could say things when you where walking that you might not otherwise have said with the pressure of eye contact across a table.”

— Liane Moriarty

276. “A woman would be more intelligent, obviously.”

— Liane Moriarty

277. “It was something to do with her sense of always feeling separate from everybody else, as if things that worried them couldn’t possibly worry her, as if she were immune from the ordinariness of life.”

— Liane Moriarty

278. “Jane saw that Madeline’s feelings about Jane’s baking were similar to Jane’s feelings about Madeline’s accessories: confused admiration for an exotic behavior.”

— Liane Moriarty

279. “We’d traveled, we’d been to lots of parties, lots of movies and concerts, we’d slept in. We’d done all those things that people with children seem to miss so passionately. We didn’t want those things anymore. We wanted a baby.”

— Liane Moriarty

280. “But every time she tried yoga she found herself silently chanting her own mantra: I’m so boooored, I’m so boooored.”

— Liane Moriarty

281. “It was good to remember that for every horrible memory from her marriage, there was also a happy one.”

— Liane Moriarty

282. “Jane walked into the playground feeling a strange sense of calm. Perhaps she needed to learn from Madeline’s example. No more avoiding confrontation. March up to your critics and bloody well tell them what you think.”

— Liane Moriarty

283. “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

284. “Clementine settled for two words, “I’m sorry”, she said. She meant I’m sorry this happened. I’m sorry I didn’t see you were going through this. I’m sorry I maybe haven’t loved you the way you deserved to be loved. I’m sorry that when we faced our first crisis it showed up everything that was wrong in our marriage instead of everything that was right. I’m sorry we turned ON each other instead of TO each other.”

— Liane Moriarty

285. “But then she just got tired of hating him and started loving him again. It was easier.”

— Liane Moriarty

286. “What sort of daughter refuses to go to her mother’s house? What sort of daughter speaks with such violence to her mother about buying a new recipe book? She.”

— Liane Moriarty

287. “The sort of girl who merrily stirred up trouble for you and you still loved her.”

— Liane Moriarty

288. “I remember thinking about how mothers were prepared to run into burning buildings to save their children’s lives. I thought I should be able to go through a bit more suffering, a bit more inconvenience to give my children life. It made me feel noble. But now I realize I’m a crazy woman running into a burning house for children who don’t exist.”

— Liane Moriarty

289. “I see lots of differences between Australians and Americans – but as mothers, I think were pretty much alike!”

— Liane Moriarty

290. “They tended to give a little start when she spoke, as if the potted plant had tried to join in the conversation.”

— Liane Moriarty

291. “The word ‘sorry’ is hardly adequate for my actions.”

— Liane Moriarty

292. “Do you have an opinion on anything?” “Not really.” It was true, in a way. Opinions were for other people. It was fascinating how upset they got about them.”

— Liane Moriarty

293. “As she swam she gloried in the fact that there was nowhere to be, nothing to do, no one to worry about. No jazz pickup or karate drop-off, no homework to supervise, no birthday gifts to buy, no doctors’ appointments to book; the endless multitude of teeny-tiny details that made up her life. Each obligation on its own seemed laughably easy. It was the sheer volume that threatened to bury her.”

— Liane Moriarty

294. “It was her only real secret, so it was a pity it wasn’t juicier.”

— Liane Moriarty

295. “I’m your best friend, Erika,” he said sadly. “Don’t you know that?”

— Liane Moriarty

296. “He was all smug about how he’d negotiated flexible hours so he could continue being a hands-on dad, the dad his own father never got to be, and didn’t he just lap up all the praise he got for being such an involved father, and laugh sympathetically, but enjoyably, over the fact that Clementine never got any praise for being an involved mother?”

— Liane Moriarty

297. “Just come back home, Abigail, come back home and stop this. He left us. He left you. You were my reward. Missing out on you was his punishment. How could you choose him?”

— Liane Moriarty

298. “Their carefully relaxed demeanors hid a fragile defensiveness, as if they expected to be criticized at any moment and they weren’t going to stand for it. They both seemed to cling so hard to their chosen personalities. I am this sort of person and therefore I believe this, I think this, I do this and I am right, I’m right, I’m sure I’m right!”

— Liane Moriarty

299. “It was one of the best things about him; he liked to talk about people, study them, and work them out. He was interested in the complexities of relationships.”

— Liane Moriarty

300. “He has mistakes in his past. I have mistakes in mine. The fact that we actually are each other’s mistakes is irrelevant!”

— Liane Moriarty