Top 450 Liane Moriarty Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Watching someone have a panic attack was like looking in the eyes of someone trapped behind glass, drowning right in front of you.”

— Liane Moriarty

352. “One epidural for my headache, please.”

— Liane Moriarty

353. “Now we’re not talking. I haven’t seen him since. But I know when he comes back, we won’t talk. Or if we do, we’ll talk very, very politely and coldly – which is the same as not talking.”

— Liane Moriarty

354. “Each time she fell out of love with him, he saw it happen and waited it out.”

— Liane Moriarty

355. “Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going’ Tennessee Williams.”

— Liane Moriarty

356. “She thought it was illegal to watch television when the sun was shining.”

— Liane Moriarty

357. “So that’s how she lived with it. She did it the way so many people lived with their regrets and mistakes. They simply rewrote their stories. Her mother had re-created herself as a devoted mother: as if ballet had been her daughter’s favorite extracurricular activity, not her own obsession.”

— Liane Moriarty

358. “When he first met her odd, detached parents he understood that Heather had grown up starved of love, and when you’re starved of something you should receive in abundance, you never quite trust it.”

— Liane Moriarty

359. “The children had become wriggly and giggly, almost as if they were drunk. They seemed unable to sit still. They were sliding of their chairs, constantly knocking cutlery onto the floor, and talking in high-pitched voices over the top of one another. Alice didn’t know if this was normal behavior or not. It wasn’t exactly relaxing. Nick had his jaw clenched, as if this dinner were a horrible medical procedure he had to endure.”

— Liane Moriarty

360. “They’d both apologized, and there had been no lingering bitterness. Will wasn’t a sulker. He was actually pretty good at negotiating a compromise. And he rarely lost his sense of humor or ability to laugh at himself. “Did you see the way I repacked your frying pan?” he said. “That was a masterstroke, eh? Put you in your place, didn’t it?” For a moment.”

— Liane Moriarty

361. “I want gunshots and canned laughter and dog food commercials. Nothing seems too tragic when the television is blaring.”

— Liane Moriarty

362. “None of this seems real,” said Alice. “I’m like Alice in Wonderland. Remember how much I hated that book? Because nothing made sense. You didn’t like it either. We liked things to make sense.”

— Liane Moriarty

363. “Feel like driving your car into the nearest telegraph pole? Therapist Dr Jeremy Hodges can steer you in a better direction. FREE bottle of anti-depressants for the first ten appointments. Or.”

— Liane Moriarty

364. “That’s how she finally made herself fall back to sleep: by remembering all the glorious moments, one after the other after the other, her children’s ecstatic faces looking for their parents in the stands, looking for their approval, looking for their love, knowing it was there, knowing – she hoped they knew this – that it would always be there, even long after she and Stan were gone, because love like that was infinite.”

— Liane Moriarty

365. “Sometimes she abrogated responsibility by fantasizing about kidnappers bursting into the house, bundling her into the back of their van, and taking her away for a long rest in a nice, cool, quiet dungeon.”

— Liane Moriarty

366. “He hated Harry for dumping his father even more than he hated him for cheating.”

— Liane Moriarty

367. “One minute they were driving her home from the hospital, a tiny, wrinkled, squalling baby. The next she was all legs and cheekbones and opinions. Whoosh. It made Alice’s head spin.”

— Liane Moriarty

368. “You think the world begins and ends with you and your perfect little family and your perfect little life and you think stress is finding the perfectly color-coordinated cushions for your new $10,000 sofa.”

— Liane Moriarty

369. “But love after you’ve hurt each other and forgiven each other, bored each other and surprised each other, after you’ve seen the worst and the best – that sort of a love is ineffable. It deserves its own word.”

— Liane Moriarty

370. “Perhaps we all need a good thump on the head from time to time?”

— Liane Moriarty

371. “When he’s not being a psychotic monster,” said Dominick.”

— Liane Moriarty

372. “You know, Madison, people are going to say mean things to you all through your life, and if you keep reacting like that, you’re going to end up in jail.”

— Liane Moriarty

373. “In case she can’t get what’s in her head and her heart on the canvas. Maybe she’s afraid of being afraid. That she’ll be so paralyzed by fear she won’t do a thing, she’ll just stand there with her paintbrush, feeling like a fraud.”

— Liane Moriarty

374. “Didn’t the stupid man realize that he no longer had the power to send anyone to their room?”

— Liane Moriarty

375. “And Jeremy, her earnest face crumpled. She looked so embarrassed, I felt like I’d kicked a kitten. She was falling all over herself to apologize.”

— Liane Moriarty

376. “It seems to make no difference that she still feels exactly the same person as when she was twenty-five, the birthdays just keep right on coming.”

— Liane Moriarty

377. “Maybe, thought Alice fearfully, the other Alice who has been living my life for the last ten years isn’t very nice.”

— Liane Moriarty

378. “The doctors would fix her head and everything would be OK. She began shoving things back into the backpack. As she picked up the leather-bound diary, a photo fell out. It was a photo of three children in school uniform. It was obviously a posed shot because they were sitting in a row on a step with their elbows on their knees and their chins in their hands. There were two girls and a boy. The boy was in the middle. He had.”

— Liane Moriarty

379. “Amy, who was handling lockdown far better than her friends, because they had never experienced the permanent low-level sense of existential dread that Amy had been experiencing since she was eight years old.”

— Liane Moriarty

380. “It felt pointless celebrating without other people, as if the whole objective had always been to perform the festivities for an audience.”

— Liane Moriarty

381. “He’d forgotten how you had to up your volume when all the Delaneys were together.”

— Liane Moriarty

382. “Full-time work caused a kind of claustrophobic terror to build and build within her chest until one day there was a humiliating emotional spillage that resulted in her termination or resignation.”

— Liane Moriarty

383. “Nick explained that an aperitif was an pre-dinner drink. Nick came from an aperitif-drinking family. Alice came from a family with one dusty bottle of Baileys sitting hopefully in the back of the pantry with the tins of spaghetti.”

— Liane Moriarty

384. “She’d take Jane Turner’s brisk snippiness any day over this woman’s prissy sweetness with its razor-sharp edges.”

— Liane Moriarty

385. “It was extraordinary the way her body knew how to do things – the mobile phone, the makeup, the lock – without her mind remembering her ever having done them before.”

— Liane Moriarty

386. “Alice walked into the kitchen one day and found Tom carefully stuffing his nose with frozen peas. I wanted to see if the peas would come out of my eyeballs, he told the doctor.”

— Liane Moriarty

387. “I can’t believe they let us name a person,” Nick had said. “It feels like something only the King of the Land should be able to do.” “Or the Queen of the Kingdom,” Alice said. “Oh, they’d never let a woman name a person,” said Nick. “Obviously.”

— Liane Moriarty

388. “She has become so irritatingly optimistic ever since she took up salsa dancing.”

— Liane Moriarty

389. “Now here they were. She couldn’t exactly say if Savannah had caught them on an upswing or a downswing, or if they’d finally found an equilibrium that would last them until death did them part. Sometimes it felt like their relationship ebbed and flowed over a day, or even a conversation. She could feel affection followed by resentment in the space of ten minutes.”

— Liane Moriarty

390. “My God, she despised spaghetti bolognese. Night after night after night, plate after plate after plate. The laundry, the ironing, the mopping, the sweeping, the driving. She’d never resented it at the time but now she resented every moment, every single bloody lamb chop.”

— Liane Moriarty

391. “Accepting or allowing what happens or what others do, without active response or resistance.”

— Liane Moriarty

392. “Maybe this doctor was one of those brilliant people who are hopeless with normal stuff like dates.”

— Liane Moriarty

393. “It wasn’t just that her memories of the last ten years were back. It was that her true self, as formed by those ten years, was back. 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

394. “That’s true,” she’d said, amazed and terrified by the thought. A toddler: an actual miniature person, created by them, belonging to them, separate from them.”

— Liane Moriarty

395. “It was like every fight she’d ever had with her sisters. A wave of rage would sweep her up and carry her high and righteous until she did something embarrassingly excessive. Then it would dump her, splat, leaving her stupid and small.”

— Liane Moriarty

396. “Zach was still there. He wasn’t going anywhere. He was going to stick around while she finished uni and traveled and got a job and got married and got old. Just because he chose death didn’t mean Zoe couldn’t choose life. He was still there in her heart and her memory, and he was going to stay beside her, keeping her company right until the end.”

— Liane Moriarty

397. “Her cup size didn’t suit either her personality or profession but she was descended from a long line of short, acerbic, busty women, and so this was her lot.”

— Liane Moriarty

398. “You don’t know my age, you darling idiot, so how do you know I look great for it?”

— Liane Moriarty

399. “Grandchildren would be her second chance to get it right. Now she had the time and the eggs to spare, and she would be present with her grandchildren.”

— Liane Moriarty

400. “Finally she stopped resisting and called a truce. Young Alice was allowed to stay as long as she didn’t eat too much chocolate. 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. And maybe sometimes Young Alice had a point.”

— Liane Moriarty