Quotes from Liane Moriarty

She had always had a slight mistrust of busy people; the sort of people who described themselves as 'Flat-out Frantic!' What was the hurry? Why didn't they just slow down? Just what exactly were they so busy doing?

Claire was Troy's ex-wife, once a much-loved member of the family, just like Indira and to a lesser extent, Grant. It was like a death each time her children broke up with someone, and over the years there had been many, many deaths.

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.

as their eyes met she got that feeling again, that sensation of there being something huge between them, something she couldn't quite define, something her twenty-year-old self might have called 'passion' and her thirty-year-old self might have more cynically called 'chemistry'.

It shouldn't matter. She knew it shouldn't matter. But the fact was that some people were so unacceptably, hurtfully beautiful, it made you feel ashamed. Your inferiority was right there on display for the world to see.

They'd been too tired to keep sharpening the edges of their hurt feelings.

Sometimes when she looked at him, she felt like there was a sleeping snake tightly coiled within her chest, a snake that would one day hiss to life and strike with unimaginable, unforgivable consequences.

A glittery girl. Older than Jane but definitely still glittery. All her life Jane had watched girls like that with scientific interest. Maybe a little awe. Maybe a little envy. They weren't necessarily the prettiest, but they decorated themselves so affectionately, like Christmas trees, with dangling earrings, jangling bangles and delicate, pointless scarves. They

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.

I'll never be a normal person ever again. You took that away from me. You made me ABNORMAL and it's lonely being abnormal.

The risks were calculated. The risks were justified. No one ever ascended a mountain without risk.

Opinions were for other people. It was fascinating how upset they got about them.

It's kind of devastating." She paused. "And, Madeline, it infuriates me that I found it so devastating. It infuriates me that he had that power over me. I look in the mirror each day, and I think, 'I'm not overweight anymore,' but he's right, I'm still ugly. Intellectually I know I'm not ugly, I'm perfectly acceptable. But I feel ugly, because one man said it was so, and that made it so. It's pathetic.

things become weird and pointless if you examine them for too long.

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.

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

And sure, they love their kids, but let's be honest, they're hard work. And it's not like you get to keep those adorable babies. Babies disappear. They grow up. They

Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

Joy always overcooked chicken. She had a terror of salmonella […] She put her fingertips to her hairline. She was sweating. Food poisoning? Savannah's roast chicken had been so wonderfully tender! Was this the price you had to pay for tender chicken? It was too high a price!

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.

Brooke was meant to avoid stress because of her migraines, not chase it, but she'd always been a martyr. Amy remembered Brooke as a little girl, high pigtails and reflective sunglasses.

in times of crisis a person's face is somehow stripped back to something essential and universally human: all those labels like "beautiful," "sexy," "plain" became irrelevant.

Leonardo da Vinci: "Obstacles cannot crush me; every obstacle yields to stern resolve.

Amy had never had a boyfriend hit her, although she'd had a couple who fucked her when she was too out of it to consent, but that was before consent got fashionable. Those kinds of incidents used to be considered 'funny'. Even 'hilarious'. The worse you felt, the louder you laughed. The laughter was necessary because it put you back in charge. You didn't remember, so you created a memory you hoped was the truth.