Top 450 Liane Moriarty Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

358. “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

359. “Then how is it that not a single one of you can maintain a long-term relationship? Did your father and I not set a good example to you? Of a good marriage?’ Her children all dropped their heads as if she’d called for volunteers for an unpleasant task. ‘So your dad and I weren’t.”

— Liane Moriarty

360. “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

361. “As Jane looked around her, she felt that dissatisfied feeling she often experienced when she was somewhere new and lovely. She couldn’t quite articulate it except with the words “if only I were here”. This little beachside cafe was so exquisite, she longed to really be there – except, of course, she was there, so it didn’t make sense.”

— Liane Moriarty

362. “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

363. “That was the secret of a happy marriage: step away from the rage.”

— Liane Moriarty

364. “When she was a child her mother had once told her shyness was almost a form of selfishness. “You see, when you hang your head like that, darling, people think you don’t like them!” Tess had taken that to heart. She grew up and learned how to make small talk with a thumping heart. She forced herself to make eye contact, even when her nerves were screaming at her to look away, look away! “Bit.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

366. “An attractive, elegant, slim woman. The sort of woman she never thought it was possible for her to be. She had become one of those women, those other women, who had seemed too perfectly put together to be real.”

— Liane Moriarty

367. “Oh my Lord... she’d seduced her brother-in-law with butter.”

— Liane Moriarty

368. “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

369. “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

370. “Listeria, wisteria. Ha. Funny words. She.”

— Liane Moriarty

371. “Hooray!” said her mother. “I’m so glad you’ve lost your memory. This accident is going to turn out to be a blessing in disguise.”

— Liane Moriarty

372. “Detoxing is a myth, darling, it’s been debunked! Your liver does it for you. Or maybe it’s your kidneys. It’s all taken care of somehow.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

374. “The ones referred to obliquely and the ones discussed in frank detail. She’d give the police everything they needed to convict her husband. She would say, Here is one possible motive and here is another, because any marriage of that many years has multiple motives for murder. Every police officer and hairdresser knows that.”

— Liane Moriarty

375. “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

376. “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

377. “She had the kind of thin bony body and hard face that speaks of addiction and the streets. There was a nearly healed cut over one eye with faint purplish bruising, and Troy tried to feel the sympathy she obviously deserved, but his heart was as hard and suspicious as an ex-girlfriend’s.”

— Liane Moriarty

378. “But things change. People change. It just happens. It’s just life. The fact that you’re getting a divorce doesn’t change the fact that you had all those wonderful times. And I swear.”

— Liane Moriarty

379. “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

380. “Like so many things in life, it had seemed like an excellent idea at the time.”

— Liane Moriarty

381. “She looked at her nine guests, all of whom had their eyes obediently closed as they waited her instructions. Their destinies were in her hands. She was going to change them not just temporarily, but forever.”

— Liane Moriarty

382. “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

383. “She remembered her friend Ines talking about how, after her divorce, she’d constructed a desk from an IKEA flatpack on her own while playing ‘I Am Woman’, but then, after she was done, all she’d wanted to do was call her ex and tell him about it.”

— Liane Moriarty

384. “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

385. “Sometimes it was exhilaratingly easy to be happy again. Other times they found that they did have to “try”.”

— Liane Moriarty

386. “Alice had yearned to be a little disruptive, but she couldn’t work out how you got started.”

— Liane Moriarty

387. “Instead of remembering grief and devastation, she remembered the terrible injustice of the cheesecake.”

— Liane Moriarty

388. “She believed men’s egos were as fragile as eggs.”

— Liane Moriarty

389. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

400. “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