Top 450 Liane Moriarty Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

403. “Well, if it was a diary, Joy certainly would not read it. Absolutely not. That sort of gross invasion of privacy was only appropriate for one’s own children.”

— Liane Moriarty

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “It was so fast and violent and unexpected. Like a dear friend suddenly punching you in the face. Like some cruel god had done it on purpose. To be nasty. Picked up the tree and slammed it across the Mini in a fit of temper.”

— Liane Moriarty

408. “She’d been so cozy in the cocoon of their relationship. She assumed she got to stay there forever.”

— Liane Moriarty

409. “Their mother had that look of controlled impatience she used to get when her children fought and she didn’t have time to properly lose her temper because she had things to do.”

— Liane Moriarty

410. “The thought of separating from Jessica was like having his guts ripped out, but these days being married to Jessica was like having his guts ripped out. Whatever way you looked at it: guts ripped out.”

— Liane Moriarty

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

415. “You want me to do the gutters?’ Logan had said. Climate change. His mother threw certain phrases around at random to make sure they knew she was up to date with current affairs and listened to podcasts.”

— Liane Moriarty

416. “There was nothing Joy could do to change the outcome of her children’s lives, any more than she could have changed the outcome of their matches, no matter how hard.”

— Liane Moriarty

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “It made Alice sick with guilt when she thought about what they had put the children through that year. She and Nick had been so young, so full of the earth-shattering importance of their own feelings.”

— Liane Moriarty

425. “It was as though he had an amazing skill, like playing a complicated musical instrument, that Alice could never hope to master.”

— Liane Moriarty

426. “Her mother specialized in the tiny razor-sharp dig wrapped in a soft compliment, so you didn’t notice the blood until afterward.”

— Liane Moriarty

427. “Harry Potter deserved to feel fear and confusion, because he was legally, morally and spiritually in the wrong. It happened so rarely that you knew that you were right and the other guy was wrong; Troy was Spider-Man, the Hulk, Captain America. He was goddamned Batman. He had never felt better.”

— Liane Moriarty

428. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

430. “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

431. “In case she can’t get what’s in her head and her heart on the canvas. Maybe she’s afraid of being afraid. That she’ll be so paralyzed by fear she won’t do a thing, she’ll just stand there with her paintbrush, feeling like a fraud.”

— Liane Moriarty

432. “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

433. “On the surface they seemed loving and cheerful but she could sense dysfunction bubbling ominously beneath their sporty, matter-of-fact demeanours.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

436. “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

437. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

439. “He just randomly, arbitrarily, idiotically broke her heart.”

— Liane Moriarty

440. “Amy once told Joy that she had no idea how lonely it felt to be single. Joy had wanted to tell her that you could still be lonely when you were married, that there had been times when she had woken up day after day crushed with loneliness, and still made breakfast for four children.”

— Liane Moriarty

441. “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

442. “Maybe, thought Alice fearfully, the other Alice who has been living my life for the last ten years isn’t very nice.”

— Liane Moriarty

443. “It felt pointless celebrating without other people, as if the whole objective had always been to perform the festivities for an audience.”

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

445. “Negativity hid fear.”

— Liane Moriarty

446. “That’s what’s important these days, isn’t it. Everything should be fun and lighthearted.”

— Liane Moriarty

447. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

449. “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

450. “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