“Friends and family do not believe you write fiction. They truly believe that every word you write is either autobiographical or based on them. I once had a character say that she never wanted to be invited to another children’s birthday party, and I never received another children’s birthday party invitation ever again.”
— Liane Moriarty
“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.”
— Liane Moriarty
“We all, as parents, are laughing at ourselves and helicopter parenting and saying, ‘This isn’t the way we were parented; we were allowed to run free.’ When I talk to my friends, we are all fascinated by what we are doing, but we can’t seem to stop ourselves.”
— Liane Moriarty
“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.”
— Liane Moriarty
“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.”
— Liane Moriarty
“We’d traveled, we’d been to lots of parties, lots of movies and concerts, we’d slept in. We’d done all those things that people with children seem to miss so passionately. We didn’t want those things anymore. We wanted a baby.”
— Liane Moriarty
“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
“…the terrible thought occurred to her that perhaps she’d always unconsciously believed that because Sam didn’t cry, he therefore didn’t feel, or he felt less, not as profoundly or deeply as she did. 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 service, and she’d finally chosen the right brand to get the right response. Was it possible she’d never seen or truly loved him the way he deserved to be loved? As a person? An ordinary, flawed, feeling person?”
— Liane Moriarty
“…the terrible though occurred to her that perhaps she’d always unconsciously believed that because Sam didn’t cry, he therefore didn’t feel, or he felt less, not as profoundly or deeply as she did. 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 service, and she’d finally chosen the right brand to get the right response. Was it possible she’d never seen or truly loved him the way he deserved to be loved? As a person? An ordinary, flawed, feeling person?”
— Liane Moriarty
“She felt detached from all aspects of her life. She had no time anymore to feel. All that time she used to waste feeling, and analyzing her feelings, as if they were a matter of national significance.”
— Liane Moriarty
“All conflict can be traced back to someone’s feelings getting hurt, don’t you think?”
— Liane Moriarty
“And even though I adore the fact that Francesca has Ben’s eyes, I also see now that her biological connection to us is irrelevant. She is her own little person. She is Francesca. If we weren’t her “natural” parents, we would still have loved her just as much.”
— Liane Moriarty
“When you divorce someone, you divorce their whole family, Madeline had told her once.”
— Liane Moriarty
“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.”
— Liane Moriarty
“Just because a marriage ended didn’t mean that it hadn’t been happy at times.”
— Liane Moriarty
“They lost Olivia at Newport Beach. The panic made Alice hyperventilate. You were meant to be watching her, Nick kept saying. As if that were the point. That Alice had made a mistake. Not that Olivia was missing, but that it was Alice’s fault.”
— Liane Moriarty
“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”
— Liane Moriarty
“The sky looks comfortingly mundane compared to the garish kaleidoscope of the stained glass. It makes Rose yearn to be reliving any one of a thousand ordinary days spent with her ordinary older sister, who has now done this extraordinary thing and died.”
— Liane Moriarty
“Some secrets are meant to stay secret forever.”
— Liane Moriarty
“Great. Now Renata would have even more reason to dislike her. Jane would have an enemy. The last time she had had anything close to an enemy, she was in primary school herself. It had never crossed her mind that sending your child to school would be like going back to school yourself.”
— Liane Moriarty
“So now I just assume that it won’t work, and that if it does work, I’ll lose it anyway. This is meant to protect me, although it doesn’t, because somehow the hope sneakily finds its way in. I’m never aware of the hope until it’s gone, whooshed away like a rug pulled from under my feet, each time I hear another “I’m sorry.”
— Liane Moriarty
“Then he kissed her so deeply and so completely that she felt like she was falling, floating, spiraling down, down, down, like Alice in Wonderland.”
— Liane Moriarty
“Polly had arrived in the world outraged to discover that her sisters had gotten there before her.”
— Liane Moriarty
“It seemed to her everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip off 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; because how could you watch someone floss one minute, and the next minute share your deepest passion or tritest of 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
“If her mother had been observing this interaction, she’d tell Clementine she was wrong, that she needed to keep talking, to say everything that was on her mind, to communicate, to leave no possibility for misinterpretation.If her father were here, he’d put his finger to his lips and say, “Shh.”Clementine settled for two words.”I’m sorry,” she said.”
— Liane Moriarty
“When someone you loved was depending on your lie, it was perfectly easy.”
— Liane Moriarty
“Helicopter parents. Before I started at Pirriwee Public, I thought it was an exaggeration, this thing about parents being overly involved with their kids. I mean, my mum and dad loved me, they were, like, interested in me when I was growing up in the nineties, but they weren’t, like, obsessed with me.”
— Liane Moriarty
“If parents had children who were good sleepers, they assumed this was due to their good parenting, not good luck. They followed the rules, and the rules had been proven to work. Celeste must therefore not be following the rules. And you could never prove it to them! They would die smug in their beds.”
— Liane Moriarty
“She wanted to hug him and at the same time she kind of wanted to slap him.”
— Liane Moriarty
“Life was all about consequences”
— Liane Moriarty