Liane Moriarty > Quotes

“They say it's good to let your grudges go, but I don't know, I'm quite fond of my grudge. I tend it like a little pet.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“Early love is exciting and exhilarating. It's light and bubbly. Anyone can love like that. But 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 love is ineffable. It deserves its own word.”
― Liane Moriarty, What Alice Forgot

“Falling in love was easy.anyone could fall. It was holding on that was tricky”
― Liane Moriarty, The Husband's Secret

“All conflict can be traced back to someone’s feelings getting hurt, don’t you think?”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“None of us ever know all the possible courses our lives could have and maybe should have taken. It's probably just as well. Some secrets are meant to stay secret forever. Just ask Pandora.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Husband's Secret

“I mean a fat, ugly man can still be funny and lovable and successful,” continued Jane. “But it’s like it’s the most shameful thing for a woman to be.” “But you weren’t, you’re not—” began Madeline. “Yes, OK, but so what if I was!” interrupted Jane. “What if I was! That’s my point. What if I was a bit overweight and not especially pretty? Why is that so terrible? So disgusting? Why is that the end of the world?”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“Oh, calamity!”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“But maybe every life looked wonderful if all you saw was the photo albums.”
― Liane Moriarty, What Alice Forgot

“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, it’s that this is the way I look now.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“It’s because a woman’s entire self-worth rests on her looks,” said Jane. “That’s why. 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.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“Reading a novel was like returning to a once-beloved holiday destination.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“Those we love don’t go away, they sit beside us every day.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“You’ve been here before. It won’t kill you. It feels like you can’t breathe, but you actually are breathing. It feels like you’ll never stop crying, but you actually will.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Husband's Secret

“You could jump so much higher when you had somewhere safe to fall.”
― Liane Moriarty, Truly Madly Guilty

“Champagne is never a mistake.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“Everyone wanted to be rich and beautiful, but the truly rich and beautiful had to pretend they were just the same as everyone else.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“Marriage was a form of insanity; love hovering permanently on the edge of aggravation.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Husband's Secret

“Perhaps nothing was ever “meant to be.” There was just life, and right now, and doing your best. Being a bit “bendy.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Husband's Secret

“Did anyone really know their child? Your child was a little stranger, constantly changing, disappearing and reintroducing himself to you. New personality traits could appear overnight.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“Nothing and nobody could aggravate you the way your child could aggravate you.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“It’s all about our egos. She felt she was on the edge of understanding something important. 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. It was almost embarrassing to be truly intimate with your spouse; how could you watch someone floss one minute, and the next minute share your deepest passion or most ridiculous, trite little fears? It was almost easier to talk about that sort of thing before you’d shared a bathroom and a bank account and argued over the packing of the dishwasher.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Husband's Secret

“Each memory, good and bad, was another invisible thread that bound them together...It was as simple and complicated as that. Love after children, 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 love is ineffable. It deserves its own word.”
― Liane Moriarty, What Alice Forgot

“You could try as hard as you could to imagine someone else’s tragedy—drowning in icy waters, living in a city split by a wall—but nothing truly hurts until it happens to you. Most of all, to your child.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Husband's Secret

“It had never crossed her mind that sending your child to school would be like going back to school yourself.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“She’d swallowed it whole and pretended it meant nothing, and therefore it had come to mean everything.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“Happy endings always made her cry. It was the relief.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Husband's Secret

“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.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“It wasn’t logical, but the better you knew someone, the more blurry they became. The accumulation of facts made them disappear. It was more interesting wondering if someone did or didn’t like country music than knowing one way or the other.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Husband's Secret

“They would think she was savoring the taste (blueberries, cinnamon, cream-excellent), but she was actually savoring the whole morning, trying to catch it, pin it down, keep it safe before all those precious moments became yet another memory.”
― Liane Moriarty, What Alice Forgot

“She longed to feel something momentous. Sometimes her life seemed so little.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Husband's Secret