Top 500 Liane Moriarty Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “That’s my great-granddaughter you just heard. Gets all her talent from me!” He has appropriated my family in typical Xavier fashion. They don’t seem to mind.”

— Liane Moriarty

352. “There’s not a damned thing wrong with your body. You are average-sized, you deluded fool! You are an attractive, intelligent woman, you idiot! You should spend January lying in a hammock and eating cheese.”

— Liane Moriarty

353. “She made the right choice for the girl she was then.”

— Liane Moriarty

354. “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

355. “Here’s the thing. You don’t know my father. He’s a stranger to you. All you see is a grumpy old man. He suppresses his emotions. That’s what men of his age do. That’s probably why he looks guilty to you.”

— Liane Moriarty

356. “As soon as he woke he’d be desperate to give Celeste his gift. He loved giving presents. The first time she knew she wanted to marry him was when she saw the anticipation on his face, watching his mother open a birthday present he’d bought for her. “Do you like it?” he’d burst out as soon she tore the paper, and his family had all laughed at him for sounding like a big kid.”

— Liane Moriarty

357. “I’m not going to stop worrying. I like worrying. I come from a long line of worriers. It’s in my blood. I just want you to make it stop hurting, please, Dr. Hodges.”

— Liane Moriarty

358. “For her, the smell of cigarettes smelled like love. She dated far too many smokers for this reason.”

— Liane Moriarty

359. “She knew one tiny grandchild was all it would take to stop the silence roaring, to make her days splutter back to life again, but you could not ask your children for grandchildren.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

361. “We’re all on our own. Even when you’re surrounded by people, or sharing a bed with a loving lover, you’re alone.”

— Liane Moriarty

362. “I hate you all. For no particular reason. I guess it’s for the sympathy, the pity and understanding, but most of all, for the hope.”

— Liane Moriarty

363. “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

364. “I never believed it. That day in the Port-a-loo, while the world’s largest lemon meringue pie baked, I was convinced I was having my last miscarriage. But then the bleeding stopped. It was just “spotting,” as the medical world cheerily calls it. A spot of rain. A spot of bother. But even when the spotting finally stopped, I didn’t believe I was having a baby.”

— Liane Moriarty

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “For the first time in her sixty-nine years she felt the fear: the fear every woman knows is always waiting for her, the possibility that lurks and scuttles in the shadows of her mind, even if she’s spent her entire life being so tenderly loved and protected by good men.”

— Liane Moriarty

369. “She moved through therapists like she moved through boyfriends. She dumped both boyfriends and therapists when they offended her, enraged her, bored her. The boyfriends said she was a head case, a nut case, a drama queen, a psycho. The therapists said she had ADHD or OCD, depression or anxiety or most likely both, a nervous disorder, a mood disorder, a.”

— Liane Moriarty

370. “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

371. “She’s very loving – maybe too loving. I remember her squatting down in the kitchen saying, ‘Hello, little fella,’ and we all looked down and saw she was trying to pat a cockroach. Mum nearly dropped dead on the spot.”

— Liane Moriarty

372. “And sure, they love their kids, but let’s be honest, they’re hard work. And it’s not like you get to keep those adorable babies. Babies disappear. They grow up. They.”

— Liane Moriarty

373. “He told Harry that he had to win prize money so his sister could get some kind of life-saving medicine. Dumb kid thought he was playing to save his sister’s life. No wonder he cheated. If he’d stayed with me, I would have found out and put a stop to.”

— Liane Moriarty

374. “He was a good man, but they brought out something terrible in each other, like allergic reactions.”

— Liane Moriarty

375. “Every morning I worry that somebody I know will be killed in a terrorist attack that day. That means the terrorists have won, Ben tells me. He doesn’t understand that I’m fighting off the terrorists by worrying about them. It’s my own personal War on Terror.”

— Liane Moriarty

376. “Claire was Troy’s ex-wife, once a much-loved member of the family, just like Indira and to a lesser extent, Grant. It was like a death each time her children broke up with someone, and over the years there had been many, many deaths.”

— Liane Moriarty

377. “All her children would be single. All possible grandchildren swept off the table in one fell swoop. It would knock her for six, as their father would say. He hated cricket, but liked that particular sporting colloquialism.”

— Liane Moriarty

378. “It was just a plate, her father kept saying to Christina. He never understood what that plate represented: Disrespect. Disregard. Contempt.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

380. “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

381. “They were sitting on the couch chatting politely with me, not touching, or so it seemed, except that I happened to glance down and I saw that their hands were lying next to each other on the couch, and that Nick was caressing Alice’s little finger with his own. I remember being shocked by a feeling of pure envy. I wanted to be Alice, young and lovely, feeling the secret caress of a handsome boy’s fingertip.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

383. “Real people don’t have the answers. They make mistakes. They say things with great authority and they’re wrong.”

— Liane Moriarty

384. “They’d been too tired to keep sharpening the edges of their hurt feelings.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

386. “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

387. “She’d never wanted his gratitude, just his acknowledgment. Just once.”

— Liane Moriarty

388. “I must eat,” said Amy. “Brooke, go tell Mum we have to eat something now because you’re getting a migraine.” “You tell her you have to eat because you’re having a panic attack,” retorted Brooke. “Tell her Logan is hungry,” said Troy. “She won’t want Logan to be hungry.” “I told her I was hungry an hour ago,” said Logan.”

— Liane Moriarty

389. “A dying person can take pride in her thinness, point at her hipbones, and say, “Look how skinny I am!” as if it’s a nice bonus, and you can’t shout, “You’re skinny because you’re DYING, you silly woman!”

— Liane Moriarty

390. “Stan Delaney had always known that women had the power to draw blood with their words. It was his mother’s favorite hobby: to knife the soft, stupid, defenseless egos of her husband and her son.”

— Liane Moriarty

391. “I knew there is nothing more patronizing to an Infertile than to hear a new mother complaining, as if that will make you feel better for not having your own baby. It’s like telling a blind person, “Oh, sure, you get to see mountains and sunsets, but there are also rubbish dumps and pollution! Terrible!”

— Liane Moriarty

392. “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

393. “Troy couldn’t make himself care or focus. The market was quiet, but not that quiet. His heart wasn’t in it. He’d made only one trade in the last two hours. That was a signal he should stop for the day, according to his own rules, and rule number one was Follow Your Own Rules.”

— Liane Moriarty

394. “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

395. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

397. “I’m only temporarily tragic, she told herself.”

— Liane Moriarty

398. “She didn’t believe in alternate realities. She believed in the transcendent power of love, memory and imagination. ‘Anything is possible.”

— Liane Moriarty

399. “She wanted to see it clearly, to understand that it wasn’t all black, or all white. It was a million colors. And.”

— Liane Moriarty

400. “I’ll never be a normal person ever again. You took that away from me. You made me ABNORMAL and it’s lonely being abnormal.”

— Liane Moriarty