Quotes from Liane Moriarty

It didn't take Celeste long to realize that this was going to be the sort of book club where the book was secondary to the proceedings. She felt a mild disappointment. She'd been looking forward to talking about the book. She'd even, embarrassingly, prepared for book club, like a good little lawyer, marking up a few pages with Post-it notes and writing a few pithy comments in the margins.

Or maybe temporary insanity is just an excuse for inexcusable behavior.

Don't let your heart be a casualty of your head.

Overtired five-year-olds needed to be handled like explosive devices.

Early love is exciting and exhilarating. It's light and bubbly. Anyone can love like that. But love after three children, after a separation and a near-divorce, 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—well, that sort of a love is ineffable. It deserves its own word.

Sometimes they purposely asked people over just to give themselves the incentive to clean up in a frantic rush before they arrived.

The house was literally perfect now. Instead of being thrilling, that suddenly seemed depressing.

If the counselor ever wrote a book about her experience as a marriage counselor she would probably mention it: I once had a patient who treated his car more tenderly than he treated his wife. (No need to mention the car was a Lamborghini, otherwise all the male readers would say, "Oh, well, then.")

Cat felt that sense of pleasure and pride that she always felt when she saw her sisters in public. "Look at them!" she wanted to say to people. "My sisters. Aren't they great? Aren't they annoying?

For the first time in her sixty-nine years she felt the fear: the fear every woman knows is always waiting for her, the possibility that lurks and scuttles in the shadows of her mind, even if she's spent her entire life being so tenderly loved and protected by good men.

But if the girls hadn't got their knickers in a knot, and that might sound sexist but it's not, it's just a fact of life, ask any man, not some new age, artsy-fartsy, I-wear-moisturiser type, I mean a real man, ask a real man, then he'll tell you that women are like the Olympic athletes of grudges.

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.

Did one act define who you were forever? Did one evil act as a teenager counteract twenty years of marriage, of good marriage, twenty years of being a good husband and a good father? Murder and you are a murderer. That was how it worked for other people. For strangers.

Parents do tend to judge each other. I don't know why. Maybe because none of us really know what we're doing? And I guess that can sometimes lead to conflict.

Now Logan competed against Troy by not competing, which was fucking genius. You couldn't win if only one of you was playing.

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

Miss Barnes clearly didn't know what in the world to do. She was twenty-four years old, for heaven's sake.

Wherever she went, whatever she did, part of her mind was always imagining a hypothetical life running parallel to her actual one,

It's like telling a blind person, "Oh, sure, you get to see mountains and sunsets, but there are also rubbish dumps and pollution!

But women like Tess didn't seem to have that need to share the ordinary facts of their lives, and that made Cecilia desperate to know them.

Everywhere Frances looked there were children: children sitting gravely behind news desks, controlling traffic, running writers' festivals, taking her blood pressure, managing her taxes, and fitting her bras.

The gym? Alice didn't go to gyms. Had she woken up drunk in a gym?

People thought that tragedy made you wise, that it automatically elevated you to a higher, spiritual level, but it seemed to Rachel that just the opposite was true. Tragedy made you petty and spiteful. It didn't give you any great knowledge or insight. She didn't understand a damned thing about life except that it was arbitrary and cruel, and some people got away with murder, while others made one tiny careless mistake and paid a terrible price.

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?