Quotes from Liane Moriarty

A marriage is hard work and sometimes it's a bit of a bore. It's like housework. It's never finished. You've just got to grit your teeth and keep working away at it, day after day.

Time went by so fast these days. There was some sort of malfunctioning going on with how fast Earth was spinning. Decades went by as quick as years once did.

I don't get the obsession with strangers, her first husband, Sol, once said to her, and Frances had struggled to explain that strangers were by definition interesting. It was their strangeness. The not-knowing. Once you knew everything there was to know about someone, you were generally ready to divorce them.

No one warned you that having children reduced you right down to some smaller, rudimentary, primitive version of yourself, where your talents and your education and your achievements meant nothing. Clementine

A red traffic light loomed, and Cecilia slammed her foot on the brake. The fact that Polly no longer wanted a pirate party was breathtakingly insignificant in comparison to that poor man (thirty!) crashing to the ground for the freedom that Cecilia took for granted, but right now, she couldn't pause to honor his memory, because a last-minute change of party theme was unacceptable. That's what happened when you had freedom. You lost your mind over a pirate party.

Each memory, good and bad, was another invisible thread that bound them together, even when they were foolishly thinking they could lead separate lives. It was as simple and complicated as that.

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.

It is a very pretty beach. We're not really beach people, and obviously no one wants to see this in a bikini!" She made a face of pure loathing and gestured at her perfectly ordinary body, which Madeline judged to be about the same size as her own. "I don't see why not," said Madeline. She had no patience for this sort of talk. It drove her to distraction the way women wanted to bond over self-hatred.

Frances longed to Google it. How was she going to cope for ten days without instant answers to idle questions?

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. This was what a woman was meant to look like. Exactly this.

She made the right choice for the girl she was then.

That's what's so embarrassing about all this. Each time I sobbed for a lost baby, it was like sobbing over the end of a relationship when I'd never even gone out with the guy. My babies weren't babies. They were just microscopic clusters of cells that weren't ever going to be anything else. they were just my own desperate hopes. Dream babies. And people have to give up on dreams.

Their arguments always went like this. The angrier Madeline got, the more freakishly calm Ed became, until he reached a point where he sounded like a hostage negotiator dealing with a lunatic and a ticking bomb. It was infuriating.

Two musicians could play the same notes and sound entirely different. Intonation was everything.

Each time she fell out of love with him, he saw it happen and waited it out. He never stopped loving her, even those times when he felt deeply hurt and betrayed by her, even in that bad year when they talked about separating, he'd just gone along with it, waiting for her to come back to him, thanking God and his dad up above each time she did.

Today would be perfect in every way. The Facebook photos wouldn't lie. So much joy. Her life had so much so joy. That was an actual verifiable fact.

Alice would give anything, anything at all, to be lying in bed with Nick, waiting for a cup of tea. Maybe he got sick of making her cups of tea? Was that it? Had she taken him for granted? Who did she think she was, some sort of princess, lying in bed waiting for cups of tea to be delivered.

We were so happy.

It wasn't her dream job, but she did quite enjoy the satisfaction of transforming a messy pile of paperwork into neat rows of figures.

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.

She was a far better mother when she had an audience.

Carmel experienced another burst of euphoria. She might have lost a husband, but she got herself a wife. An efficient, energetic young wife. What a bargain. What an upgrade.

Elderly women were as tough as nails but it seemed that men got softer as they aged; their emotions caught them off guard, as if some protective barrier had been worn away by time.

She had not realised that grief was so physical. Before Zach died, she thought grief happened in your head. She didn't know that your whole body ached with it, that it screwed up your digestive system, your menstrual cycle, your sleep patterns, your skin. You wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy.