Top 450 Liane Moriarty Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “That was the secret of a happy marriage: step away from the rage.”

— Liane Moriarty

352. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

354. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

360. “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

361. “Friendship and holidays. A swimming pool. Champagne and sunshine and laughter. It seemed like a dream life.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

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

— Liane Moriarty

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

376. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

385. “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

386. “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

387. “I’d be at work, where people respected my opinions,” said Nick. “And then I’d come home and it was like I was the village idiot. I’d pack the dishwasher the wrong way. I’d pick the wrong clothes for the children. I stopped offering to help. It wasn’t worth the criticism.”

— Liane Moriarty

388. “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

389. “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

390. “The risk of upsetting Stan outweighed the risk of upsetting Amy. The risk of upsetting Stan had always outweighed the risk of upsetting any of the children. Nearly always.”

— Liane Moriarty

391. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

393. “Remember your ABC?” he’d ask, so often it got irritating. “Accept nothing. Believe nothing. Check everything,” Christina would answer.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

396. “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

397. “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

398. “There were breakfasts when Nick was away for work. She ate her toast in bed when he was away, relishing the romantic pain of missing him, as if he were a sailor or soldier. It was like enjoying feeling hungry when you knew you’d be having a huge dinner.”

— Liane Moriarty

399. “A child laughed; a long, gurgling giggle, like a stream of soap bubbles.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty