Top 450 Liane Moriarty Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

403. “When he’s not being a psychotic monster,” said Dominick.”

— Liane Moriarty

404. “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

405. “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

406. “Didn’t the stupid man realize that he no longer had the power to send anyone to their room?”

— Liane Moriarty

407. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

413. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

419. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

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

— Liane Moriarty

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

— Liane Moriarty

444. “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

445. “She was getting far too used to having someone cook and clean for her. This was what it must be like to be a celebrity. No wonder they were so charismatic and cheerful on talk shows. Joy could feel herself becoming more charismatic and cheerful by the day.”

— Liane Moriarty

446. “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

447. “Grandmothers died. It was to be expected. You weren’t even allowed to be that upset about it. Please don’t let Frannie have died. Please don’t let anyone have died. “Nobody else in our family will.”

— Liane Moriarty

448. “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

449. “And of course Madison would have been smart enough to pick up on Alice’s resentment. She was already a child who felt everything far too deeply. She’d seen her mother’s friend killed in an accident and then her parents separated. No.”

— Liane Moriarty

450. “Ooh, sacrilege!’ Amy had said, because her role as the oldest child was to narrate every family argument and use big words the other kids didn’t understand, while Brooke, still little and adorable, had burst into inevitable tears, and Logan’s face became blank and moronic.”

— Liane Moriarty