Liane Moriarty Quotes

We were so happy.

~ Liane Moriarty

She quite liked this aspect of her personality, the way her mood could change from melancholy to euphoric because of a breeze or a flavor or a beautiful chord progression. It meant she never had to feel too down about feeling down.

~ Liane Moriarty

Baths, she thought, were just like her relationships, all ooh, ah in the beginning and then suddenly, without warning, she had to get out, out, out!

~ Liane Moriarty

It was strange, because she always felt that she hid herself from Erika, that she was more 'herself' with her 'true' friends, where the friendship flowed in an ordinary, uncomplicated, grown-up fashion (emails, phone calls, drinks, dinners, banter and jokes that everyone got), but right now it felt like none of those friends knew her the raw, ugly, childish, basic way that Erika did.

~ Liane Moriarty

Toxic' was actually an accurate description of the feelings Clementine had so often felt in Erika's presence: the intense aggravation she had to work so hard to resist and conceal, the disappointment with herself, because Erika wasn't evil or cruel or stupid, she was simply annoying, and Clementine's response to her annoyingness was so completely disporportionate, it embarassed and confounded her. Erika loved Clementine. She'd do anything for her. So why did she inflame Clementine so? It was like she was allergic to her.

~ Liane Moriarty

One of the multitudes of exboyfriends had been a country music fan and left Gemma with an unfortunate passion for Tammy Wynette. It was like, Cat thought, he’d given her herpes.

~ Liane Moriarty

Somehow she knew there would be an unspoken truce on their unspoken battle over God knew what when they were old. They could both surrender to their innate grumpiness. It was going to be a lovely relief.

~ Liane Moriarty

It's because we live in a beauty-obsessed society where the most important thing a woman can do is make herself attractive to men.

~ Liane Moriarty

If someone had asked him about his dreams on the morning of the barbecue, he would have said that he didn't want for much, but he wouldn't mind a lower mortgage, a tidier house, another baby - ideally a son, but he'd take another girl no problem at all - a big motherfucking boat if it were up for grabs, and more sex. He would have laughed about the sex. Or smiled at least. A rueful smile. Maybe the smile would have been exactly halfway between rueful and bitter.

~ Liane Moriarty

And maybe it was more than that.Maybe it was actually an unspoken instant agreement between the four women on the balcony: No woman should pay for the accidental death of this particular man. Maybe it was an involuntary, atavistic response to thousands of years of violence against women. Maybe it was for every rape, every brutal backhanded slap, every other Perry that had come before this one.

~ Liane Moriarty

Sometimes there was the pure, primal pain of grief, and other times there was anger, the frantic desire to claw and hit and kill, and sometimes, like right now, ther was just ordinary, dull sadness, settling itself softly, suffocatingly over her like a heave fog.She was just so damned sad.

~ Liane Moriarty

It's about making a choice to make your marriage a priority, to, kind of, put that at the top of the page, as your mission statement or something.

~ Liane Moriarty

He knew how the audition was going to affect their lives for the next ten weeks as she slowly lost her mind from nerves and the strain of trying to scrounge precious practice time from an already jam-packed life. No matter how much time poor Sam gave her, it would never be quite enough, because what she actually needed was for him and the kids to just temporarily not exist. She needed to slip into another dimension where she was a single, childless person. Just between now and the audition. She needed to go to a mountain chalet (somewhere with good acoustics) and live and breathe nothing but music. Go for walks. Meditate. Eat well. Do all those positive-visualization exercises young musicians did these days. She had an awful suspicion that if she were to do this in reality, she might not even miss Sam and the children that much, or if she did miss them, it would be quite bearable.

~ Liane Moriarty

This was historical revisionism at its best, and hadn't Sam always specialized in that, hadn't she always said she wished she had a permanent film rolling of their life so she could go back and prove that, yes, he did so say that thing he now denied?

~ Liane Moriarty

If he could just have one more chance, he'd act like the man he'd always believed himself to be.

~ Liane Moriarty

Why hadn't that been part of his stupid lifelong redemption program: Do what my wife asks immediately so she doesn't feel like a nag.

~ Liane Moriarty

Nothing is rigid. Things change. You can change your mind. You can change your thinking.

~ Liane Moriarty

You can think something is one way all your life, and it turns out you're wrong, it can be something else entirely.

~ Liane Moriarty

People can do what they like in the privacy of their own homes.

~ Liane Moriarty

Not all mysteries are meant to be solved. Not all secrets are meant to be told.

~ Liane Moriarty

You think terrible things happened on the battlefields, but terrible things happened in ordinary suburban homes.

~ Liane Moriarty

Every marriage, every family, has its mysteries.

~ Liane Moriarty

Women always reveal their deepest secrets to each other.

~ Liane Moriarty

When you divorce someone, you divorce their whole family.

~ Liane Moriarty

She felt hot liquid anger suddenly cool and harden into something powerful and immovable.

~ Liane Moriarty

What are you babbling on about, woman? sighed Chloe. She'd picked this phrase up from her father and imitated his weary tone perfectly. They'd made the mistake of laughing the first time she did it, so she'd kept it up, and said it just often enough, and with perfect timing, so that they couldn't help but keep laughing.

~ Liane Moriarty

In those years when their mother disappeared into herself, and old Mrs Jeffrey next door turned into Frannie, their honorary grandmother, Alice also taught herself how to change light bulbs, fix running toilets and cook chops and veggies while Elisabeth learned how to demand refunds, pay bills, fill in forms and talk to strangers.

~ Liane Moriarty

She was busy thinking about the concept of forgiveness. It was such a lovely, generous idea when it wasn't linked to something awful that needed forgiving.

~ Liane Moriarty

I didn't have enough other people in my life to cover the loss of this many people at once. I didn't have spare aunties or cousins or grandparents. I didn't have backup. I didn't have insurance to cover a loss like this.

~ Liane Moriarty

Only a man could come up with something so ruthless, so essentially stupid and yet brutally effective.

~ Liane Moriarty

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

I remember thinking about how mothers were prepared to run into burning buildings to save their children's lives. I thought I should be able to go through a bit more suffering, a bit more inconvenience to give my children life. It made me feel noble. But now I realize I'm a crazy woman running into a burning house for children who don't exist.

~ Liane Moriarty

Life was all about consequences

~ Liane Moriarty

She wanted to hug him and at the same time she kind of wanted to slap him.

~ Liane Moriarty

If parents had children who were good sleepers, they assumed this was due to their good parenting, not good luck. They followed the rules, and the rules had been proven to work. Celeste must therefore not be following the rules. And you could never prove it to them! They would die smug in their beds.

~ Liane Moriarty

Helicopter parents. Before I started at Pirriwee Public, I thought it was an exaggeration, this thing about parents being overly involved with their kids. I mean, my mum and dad loved me, they were, like, interested in me when I was growing up in the nineties, but they weren't, like, obsessed with me.

~ Liane Moriarty

When someone you loved was depending on your lie, it was perfectly easy.

~ Liane Moriarty

It seemed to her everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip off down to their souls in front of their long-term partners. It was easier to pretend there was nothing more to know, to fall into an easygoing companionship. It was almost embarrassing to be truly intimate with your spouse; because how could you watch someone floss one minute, and the next minute share your deepest passion or tritest of fears? It was almost easier to talk about that sort of thing before you’d shared a bathroom and a bank account and argued over the packing of the dishwasher.

~ Liane Moriarty

Polly had arrived in the world outraged to discover that her sisters had gotten there before her.

~ Liane Moriarty

Then he kissed her so deeply and so completely that she felt like she was falling, floating, spiraling down, down, down, like Alice in Wonderland.

~ Liane Moriarty