Top 450 Liane Moriarty Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “We were so happy.”

— Liane Moriarty

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

259. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

264. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

266. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

277. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

285. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

293. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

297. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

299. “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

300. “Had they both been suffering a form of temporary insanity? It was a defense for murder, after all; why not for married couples? Marriage was a form of insanity; love hovering permanently on the edge of aggravation.”

— Liane Moriarty