Top 450 Liane Moriarty Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

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. “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

365. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

372. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

376. “She always forgot how pain was so upsetting. Cruel. It hurt your feelings. You just wanted it to stop, please, right now.”

— 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. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

383. “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

384. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— 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. “It’s excellent.” Lars took another sip, trying to get the full picture. Wine could fool you: all sunshine and apples and spaghetti and then nothing but sour disappointment and empty promises.”

— Liane Moriarty

391. “I like worrying. I come from a long line of worriers. It’s in my blood.”

— Liane Moriarty

392. “She found that the less she thought, the more often she found simple truths appearing right in front of her.”

— Liane Moriarty

393. “What was the actual benefit of accuracy when it came to memories?”

— Liane Moriarty

394. “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

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. “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

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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