Liane Moriarty Quotes

When Frances was eight years old, a man patted her mother's bottom as he walked past them on a suburban street. "Nice arse," he said in a friendly tone. Frances remembered thinking, Oh, that's kind of him. And then she'd watched in shock as her five-foot-nothing mother chased the man to the corner and swung a heavy handbag full of hardback library books at the back of his head.

No. I love my grudges. I tend to them like little pets.

Madeline

How in the world had Bonnie managed to get Madeline's ex-husband out of bed at that time of morning to go to work in a homeless shelter? Nathan wouldn't get up before eight a.m. in the ten years they'd been together. Bonnie must give him organic blow jobs. "Abigail

missions. A moment later she heard the sound of the television start up. The clever little thing had worked out how to use the remote control. 'Not till August,' said Lauren. 'We've got lots to sort out. Visas and so on. We'll have to find an apartment, a nanny for Jacob.' A nanny for Jacob. 'Job for me.' Rob sounded a little nervous. 'Oh, yes, darling,' said Rachel. She did try to take her son seriously. She really did. 'A job for you. In real estate, do you think?' 'Not sure yet,' said Rob. 'We'll have to see. I might end up being a house husband.' 'So sorry I never taught him how to cook,' said Rachel to Lauren, not especially sorry. Rachel had never been much interested in cooking or that good at it; it was just another chore that had to be done, like the laundry. The way people went on these days about cooking. 'That's okay,' beamed Lauren. 'We'll probably eat out a lot in New York. The city that never sleeps,

She'd always known she was a bit unnatural. Now it was proven. Her emotional responses were somehow never quite right. When she met Callum she thought he'd saved her, but obviously it was only temporary.

It was like she was thinking, How far can I go with this? How much more can I fit in my life without losing control?

Mothers took their mothering so seriously now. Their frantic little faces ... Ponytails swinging. Eyes fixed on the mobile phones held in the palms of their hands like compasses.

Everyone had another sort of life up their sleeve that might have made them happy.

even when the spotting finally stopped, I didn't believe I was having a baby. Even when every ultrasound was normal. Even when I could feel the baby kicking and rolling, even when I was going to prenatal classes, choosing a crib, washing the baby clothes, and even when they were telling me, Okay, you can push now, I still didn't believe I was having a baby. Not an actual baby. Until she cried. And I thought, That sounds like a real newborn baby. And

They could fall in love with fresh, new people, or they could have the courage and humility to tear off some essential layer of themselves and reveal to each other a whole new level of otherness, a level far beyond what sort of music they liked. It seemed to her everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip 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.

How strange it all was. Wouldn't it be a lot less messy if everyone just stayed with the people they married in the first place?

Clementine learned to feel bad about her white middle-class privilege long before it became fashionable.

So it's Alice's fault that I never invested the appropriate time worrying about infertility. I never insured against it by worrying about it. I won't make that mistake again. Now every day I remember to worry that Ben will die in a car accident on his way to work. I make sure I worry at regular intervals about Alice's children - ticking off every terrible childhood disease: meningitis, leukemia. Before I go to sleep at night I worry that someone I love will die in the night. Every morning I worry that somebody I know will be killed in a terrorist attack that day. That means the terrorists have won, Ben tells me. He doesn't understand that I'm fighting off the terrorists by worrying about them. It's my own personal War on Terror. That

(Why did she think tall people couldn't be crazy? Because they looked like they ruled the world?

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

He made her more confident, funnier, smarter. He brought out all the things that were there already and let her be fully herself, so she seemed to shine with this inner light. He loved her so much, he made her seem even more lovable.

Most of Cecilia's friends were talkers. Their voices overlapped in their desperation to tell their stories. I've always hated vegetables . . . The only vegetable my child will eat is broccoli . . . My kid loves raw carrots . . . I love raw carrots! You had to jump right in without waiting for a pause in the conversation, because otherwise you'd never get your turn. 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. Does her kid like broccoli? she'd

there was real pain in the world, right this very moment people were suffering unimaginable atrocities and you couldn't close your heart completely, but you couldn't leave it wide open either, because otherwise how could you possibly live your life, when through pure, random luck you got to live in paradise? You

The words "I´m sorry" felt like an insult. You said "I´m sorry" when you bumped against someone´s supermarket trolley. There need to be bigger words.

She was the missing ingredient they needed. The hint of nutmeg. Connie

it," finished Susi. "It's almost worth it." Celeste met Susi's raccoon eyes. "Yes." The blandness of Susi's gaze said nothing at all except, Got it. She wasn't being kind and maternal, and she wasn't reveling in the delicious superiority

It was the lesser of two evils.

Everyone wanted to be rich and beautiful, but the truly rich and beautiful had to pretend they were just the same as everyone else.

Now you can get on Facebook and read an article, '10 Ways You Are Ruining Your Child Forever.' I'm sure it's making us better parents in some ways, but in other ways, it is sending us all a little crazy.

It's raining, it's pouring, the old man
is snoring; went to bed and bumped his head and couldn't get up in
the morning.

Debbie served them home-made Anzac biscuits.

What happened never mattered all that much because he was always about to leave,

We were so happy.

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.

It felt like another loss. Each time he thought he was doing well, avoiding the hope. Each time he told himself: I have no expectations, but with each new failure it hurt so much he understood the hope had been there after all, flitting seductively around his subconscious. It didn't get easier either. It got worse. A cumulative effect. Loss upon loss.

Your inferiority was right there on display for the world to see.

There was something pathetic about the rejected wife bravely pulling herself together, joining a tennis club, doing a photography course, cutting her hair, venturing timidly back out onto the single scene.

My husband hits me, Renata. Never on the face of course. He's far too classy for that. Does yours hit you?

But then there were the other times, unexpected quiet moments, where they'd catch each other's eyes, and all the years of hurt and joy, bad times and good times, seemed to fuse into a feeling that she knew was so much stronger, more complex and real, than of those fledgling feelings for Dominick, or even the love she'd first felt for Nick in those early years.

Apparently, moving back home was just like joining Facebook, when middle-aged boyfriends came crawling out of the woodwork like cockroaches, suggesting drinks, putting out their nasty feelers for potential affairs.

This can happen to anyone.

She had too much imagination. Too much empathy [ ... ] there was real pain in the world, right this very moment people were suffering unimaginable atrocities and you couldn't close your heart completely, but you couldn't leave it wide open either, because otherwise how could you possibly live your life, when through pure, random luck you got to live in paradise?

Little kids, little problems. Wait till you've got drugs and sex and social media to worry about.

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.

When you're in a relationship you get stuck playing out your different parts.

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.

There was a lot of kissing of both cheeks in 2008.

I see lots of differences between Australians and Americans - but as mothers, I think we're pretty much alike!

Madison rolled her eyes. "No. I won't care if people say mean things to me, because I'll be grown up. I can just say, 'Who cares? I'm going to France.' " Ah.

Oh, come on now, she said mildly, as a car suddenly pulled into the lane in front of her. She lifted her hand to toot the horn and then didn't bother. Note how I didn't scream and yell like a mad person, she thought for the benefit of that afternoon's psychotic truck driver, just in case he happened to have stopped by to read her mind.

Google is my best friend and my worst enemy. It's fabulous for research, but then it becomes addictive. I'll have a character eating an orange, and next thing I'm Googling types of oranges, I'm visiting chat rooms about oranges, I'm learning the history of the orange.

Madeline traveled with ease through dozens of overlapping social circles, making both lifelong friends and lifetime enemies along the way; probably more of the latter.

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

But I feel ugly, because one man said it was so, and that made it so. It's pathetic.

night's sleep!' she said. 'Every day I think, gosh you look a bit tired today, and it's just recently occurred to me that it's not that I'm tired,

An endless gossamer-like sentence embroidered with jewel-like metaphors, far too many clauses, and a meaning so obscure it had to be profound wrapped itself around Frances's neck, but it really didn't suit her, so she wrenched it off and flung it into space, where it floated free until at last a shy author on his way to a festival to accept a prize grabbed it from the sky and used it to gag one of his beautiful corpses. It looked lovely on her. Gray-bearded critics applauded with relief, grateful it hadn't ended up in a beach read.

She remembered her first-ever boyfriend of over thirty years ago, who told her he preferred smaller breasts than hers, while his hands were on her breasts, as if she'd find this interesting, as if women's body parts were dishes on a menu and men were the goddamned diners.

This is what she said to that first boyfriend: "Sorry."

This was her first boyfriend's benevolent reply: "That's okay.

Jewelry and clothes for Isabel and Polly. A piece of the Berlin Wall for Esther.

You shouldn't only be nice to nice people.

First kisses didn't necessarily require darkness and alcohol, they could happen in the open air, with the sun warm on your face and everything around you honest and real and true.

Third child in that suburban dream of his, now at the front

bemused. "You wouldn't

You okay, Mum?" said Rob.
"I'm fine," said Rachel. She went to reach for her cup of coffee and found that she didn't have the energy to even lift her arm.

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Listeria, wisteria. Ha. Funny words. She

Got it, by Jove! We'll build a great big bloody wall and keep the buggers in!" Presumably he hadn't

there is nothing more patronizing to an Infertile than to hear a new mother complaining,

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.

Why did she give up wine for Lent? Polly was more sensible. She had given up strawberry jam. Cecilia had never seen Polly show more than a passing interest in strawberry jam, although now, of course, she was always catching her standing at the open fridge, staring at it longingly. The power of denial.

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.

It was always like that. They never said sorry. They just threw down their still-loaded weapons, ready for next time.

Over the years, 'organized' seemed to have become her most defining characteristic. It was like she was a minor celebrity with this one claim to fame. It was funny how once it became a thing that her family and friends commented on and teased her about, it seemed to perpetuate itself, so that her life was now extraordinarily well organized ...

It gave me a shock. A sudden shock of indescribable pain, like when you're a kid, and you're hit on the nose with a basketball on a cold morning, and you cannot believe how much it hurts, and your friends all laugh and you want your mother so bad.

She wished she could give Isabel a shield, like the ones riot police held, 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.

I remember the absolute joy I used to get out of writing. The purity of imagining something and then putting it down on paper - it was such a pleasure. I read whatever I could get my hands on, from 'Great Expectations' to 'The Thorn Birds.'

There was nothing wrong with the color. He'd call back the next day and say it was fine. He'd just needed to feel powerful for a few minutes. One of the younger hotshots had just made him feel inferior in a meeting.

A thank-you card," repeated Alice. "Yes. I know, I know, it's teaching them good manners and everything, but I sort of hate those thank-you cards. I always imagine the kids groaning and having to be forced into writing them. It makes me feel like an elderly aunt.

As she drove the familiar route to the school, she considered her magnificent new age. 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!

I'd pay a million dollars to be Alice and Elisabeth's age again for just one day. I'd dance like Olivia's butterfly and bite into crisp green apples and run across hot sand into the surf, and I'd walk, as far as I wanted, wherever I wanted, in big loping, leaping strides, with my head held high and my lungs filling with air. And I'd probably have sex!

Marriage to Perry meant she was always ready to justify her actions, constantly monitoring what she'd just said or done, while simultaneously feeling defensive about the defensiveness, her thoughts and feelings twisting into impenetrable knots, so that sometimes, like right now, sitting in a room with normal people, all the things she couldn't say rose in her throat and for a moment she couldn't breathe.

But the rule of life was that the boys got to decide which girls were pretty; it didn't really matter how ugly they were themselves.)

When her life fell apart there hadn't been one friend whom Tess could call. Not one friend. That's why she was behaving like this with Connor. She needed a friend.

You can still bake a perfectly good cake while losing your mind.

every relationship had its own "love account." Doing something kind for your partner was like a deposit. A negative comment was a withdrawal. The trick was to keep your account in credit.

My point is that things become weird and pointless if you examine them for too long.

Why did people feel the need to comment on the rain, when they had absolutely nothing of value to add to the conversation?

Oh, that feeling of hopeless grief and just wanting the pain to stop.

Lots of hurtful secrets are better off kept. The problem is that people find it so hard to keep them.

She wanted to see it clearly, to understand that it wasn't all black, or all white. It was a million colors. And

You weren't meant to admit, even to yourself, how badly you wanted love. The man was meant to be the icing, not the cake.

It seemed truly frightening that it was only by sheer chance that she had met Nick. It could so easily not have happened and then she would have had a shadowy, half-alive existence, like some sort of woodland creature who never sees sunlight, never even knowing how much she could love and how much she could be loved. Elisabeth once said - very definitely and severely - that the right man didn't complete you, you have to find happiness yourself, and Alice nodded agreeably, while thinking to herself, 'Oh, but yes he does.

I think I'm falling for a red herring here,

Anyway, men don't rule the world. We have a female prime minister. And you rule your world. You rule the Fitzpatrick household.

If parents had children who were good sleepers, they assumed this was due to their good parenting, not good luck.

hear you're going to be on crutches for quite a while." "Yes, well - " "Abigail has already said she's moving back home to help you." "Oh," said Madeline. "Oh." She fingered the pink petals of the flowers. "Well, I'll talk to her about it. I'll be perfectly fine. She doesn't need to look after me." "No, but I think she wants to move back home," said Nathan. "She's looking for an excuse." Madeline and Ed looked at each other. Ed shrugged. "I always thought the novelty would wear off," said Nathan. "She missed her mum. We're not her real life." "Right." "So. I should get going," said Ed. "Could you stay for a moment, mate?

But sometimes doing the wrong thing was also right.

I want gunshots and canned laughter and dog food commercials. Nothing seems too tragic when the television is blaring.

She had no idea of her weight and no interest in learning it. She knew she could be thinner, and of course when she was younger she was indeed much thinner, but she was generally happy with her body as long as it wasn't giving her pain, and bored by all the different ways women droned on about the subject of weight, as if it were one of the great mysteries of life. The recent weight-losers, evangelical about whatever method had worked for them, the thin women who called themselves fat, the average women who called themselves obese, the ones desperate for her to join in their lavish self-loathing. "Oh, Frances, isn't it just so depressing when you see young, thin girls like that!" "Not especially," Frances would say, adding extra butter to her bread roll.

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

There were worse things to be than sexist. For example, you could be the sort of person who pinched your fingers together while using the words teeny weeny.

He was a selfish, pompous, egocentric, nasty man. She did not want to be married to him, but she did not want him to marry someone else. She did not want him, but she wanted him to want her.

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.

You get what you get and you don't get upset! screamed Fred.

It was unfortunate the way adults had to repress their true feelings.

Their uptight concerns about what other people thought seemed like such a waste. Why had they been so careful and contained with their love?

Just because a marriage ended didn't mean that it hadn't been happy at times.