Top 500 Liane Moriarty Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

371. “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

372. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

374. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “Scans showed that the brain activity of someone who had taken psilocybin bore striking similarities to the brain of an experienced meditator during deep meditation.”

— Liane Moriarty

388. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “It felt like it was all still there, that time of their lives, somewhere metaphysical, accessible through some magical means other than memory.”

— Liane Moriarty

395. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

397. “She felt as if she needed to run crazily across a huge expanse of grass, flinging her body about like a puppy let off its leash.”

— Liane Moriarty

398. “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

399. “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

400. “It’s strange how rarely you sit quietly opposite the people you love, without a menu or a meal or a drink between you.”

— Liane Moriarty