Quotes from Liane Moriarty

Before meeting your baby it is impossible to know how profound the feeling of love is and how intense the anxious feelings about your baby's survival and well-being can be. —Baby Love, "Australia's Baby-Care Classic," by Robin Barker

It wasn't so much the things that her fourteen-year-old self wanted. It was the fact that she so blissfully, so completely, believed she had a right to want anything.

Parents do tend to judge each other. I don't know why. Maybe because none of us really know what we're doing?

I remember Connie and me standing there at the hospital, looking at each other, not touching, not crying, just completely and utterly shocked. Our mother was too busy to die.

Every time I ask her to explain her job, I forget to listen. Her

She had taken her time getting ready for tonight: a long steamy bath with a glass of wine and a Violent Femmes CD.

Her focus had always been on how his actions affected her feelings, as if his role was to do things for her, to her, and all that mattered was her emotional response to him, as if a "man" were a product or a service, and she'd finally chosen the right brand to get the right response.

Forty. She could still feel "forty" the way it felt when she was fifteen. Such a colorless age. Marooned in the middle of your life. Nothing would matter all that much when you were forty. You wouldn't have real feelings when you were forty, because you'd be safely cushioned by your frumpy forty-ness. Forty-year-old woman found dead. Oh dear. Twenty-year-old woman found dead. Tragedy! Sadness! Find that murderer!

Nobody had warned her that this would happen during middle age: these sudden, wildly inappropriate waves of desire for young men, with no biological imperative whatsoever. Maybe this was what men felt like all their lives? No wonder the poor things had to pay out all that money in lawsuits.

She and Felicity didn't tolerate the overly skinny, the overly sporty, the overly rich or the overly intellectual. They laughed at people with personal trainers and small dogs, people who put overly intellectual or misspelled comments on Facebook, people who used the phrase "I'm in a very good place right now" and people who always got "involved"—people like Cecilia Fitzpatrick. Tess and Felicity sat on the sidelines of life smirking at the players.

Porque en tus hijos hay algo que saca al niño que hay en ti. Nada ni nadie puede sacarte de quicio como tu hijo.

As Clementine walked back inside studying the photo, she wondered what sort of person Erika could have been, would have been, should have been, if she'd been given the privilege of an ordinary home.

She always pretended to herself that she didn't let Lauren help because she was trying to be the perfect mother-in-law, but really, when you didn't let a woman help, it was a way of keeping her at a distance, of letting her know that she wasn't family, of saying I don't like you enough to let you into my kitchen. Lauren reappeared

to protect her from male attention, that feeling of being scored each time you walked down a street, the demeaning comments yelled out of cars, that casual sweep of the eyes...

But other times life changes in an instant, with a lightning stroke of good or bad luck, with glorious or tragic consequences. You win the lottery. You step out onto a pedestrian crossing at the wrong time. You get a phone call from a lost love at exactly the right time. And suddenly your life takes a violent swerve in an entirely new direction.

The violent chords and strident voices were so startlingly different from the chiming, bubbling relaxation tapes she played all day that it was like having a bucket of cold water thrown over her head. The Violent Femmes reminded her of the eighties, and being a teenager, and feeling supercharged with hormones and hope.

Cecelia turned her gaze away from the girls and looked at the shimmer blue of their kidney shaped swimming pool, with its powerful underwater light, the perfect symbol of suburban bliss, except for that strange intermit sound like a baby choking that was coming from the pool filter.

The fights! You would not believe the fights they had! They'd be wanting to kill each other and I'd put them in separate rooms, but within five minutes they'd be back together again, playing and giggling.

Now for the first time she understood that her mother wasn't resisting love so much as bearing it. Now she knew that you could love so much it literally hurt: an actual pain in the center of her chest.

The more earnest people got, the more flippant she became. It was a flaw.

Coffee! No, wait, tea!" A decision like this one would give

As man imagines himself to be, so shall he be, and he is that which he imagines." So said Paracelsus in the fifteenth century. The idea of the power of the mind is not new, ladies and gentlemen. Good morning.

She was also out of milk, which for a few moments as she stood at the open fridge seemed like the end of the world. She actually stamped her foot. She needed the crunch of cereal contrasting with the coolness of milk.

I took so long coming to the door. I had no idea crutches were so damned tricky. I imagined myself swinging jauntily along, but they dig into your armpits like I don't know what.