The Hypnotist's Love Story Quotes

“The suffragettes didn't starve themselves for the vote, so that you girls could starve yourselves for a man.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“Perhaps all grown-ups were just children carefully putting on their grown-up disguises each day and then acting accordingly.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“Dying was such an elegant way to leave a relationship. No infidelity, no boredom, no long, complicated conversations late into the night. No “She’s still single, I hear.” No running into each other at parties and weddings. No “She’s stacked on the weight” or “She’s showing her age.” Dying was final and mysterious and gave you the last word forever.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“If she was handing over a slice of her heart, she wanted the exact same size given back in return. Actually, she really preferred a bigger piece, thank you very much.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“It's amazing how friends can slip through your fingers, how your social network can vanish like it never existed.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“I understand, intellectually, that the death of a parent is a natural, acceptable part of life. Nobody would call the death of a very sick eighty-year-old woman a tragedy. There was soft weeping at her funeral and red watery eyes. No wrenching sobs. Now I think that I should have let myself sob. I should have wailed and beaten my chest and thrown myself over her coffin. I read a poem. A pretty, touching poem I thought she would have liked. I should have used my own words. I should have said: No one will ever love me as fiercely as my mother did. I should have said: You all think you’re at the funeral of a sweet little old lady, but you’re at the funeral of a girl called Clara, who had long blond hair in a heavy thick plait down to her waist, who fell in love with a shy man who worked on the railways, and they spent years and years trying to have a baby, and when Clara finally got pregnant, they danced around the living room but very slowly, so as not to hurt the baby, and the first two years of her little girl’s life were the happiest of Clara’s life, except then her husband died, and she had to bring up the little girl on her own, before there was a single mother’s pension, before the words “single mother” even existed. I should have told them about how when I was at school, if the day became unexpectedly cold, Mum would turn up in the school yard with a jacket for me. I should have told them that she hated broccoli with such a passion she couldn’t even look at it, and that she was in love with the main character on the English television series Judge John Deed. I should have told them that she loved to read and she was a terrible cook, because she’d try to cook and read her latest library book at the same time, and the dinner always got burned and the library book always got food spatters on it, and then she’d spend ages trying to dab them away with the wet corner of a tea towel. I should have told them that my mum thought of Jack as her own grandchild, and how she made him a special racing car quilt he adored. I should have talked and talked and grabbed both sides of the lectern and said: She was not just a little old lady. She was Clara. She was my mother. She was wonderful.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“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.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“You think love is black and white. All women think that. And they’re wrong. Women are really intelligent except for when they’re being really stupid.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“(Why did she think tall people couldn’t be crazy? Because they looked like they ruled the world?”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“It sometimes seemed so peculiar and wrong to her that you could be that intimate with someone, to go to sleep with them and wake up with them, to do really quite extraordinarily personal things together on a regular basis, and then, suddenly, you don’t even know their telephone number, or where they’re living, or working, or what they did today or last week or last year... That’s why break‐ups felt like your skin was being torn from your body. It was actually strange that more people weren’t like Saskia, instead of being so well‐behaved and dignified about it.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“It sometimes seemed so peculiar and so wrong that you could be that intimate with someone, to go to sleep with him and wake up with him, to do really quite extraordinarily personal things together on a regular basis, and then, suddenly, you don't even know his telephone number, or where he's living or working, or what he did today or last week or last year.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“Negativity hid fear.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“Mum used to say that when she met my dad it was like a perfect love story. I thought Patrick was my perfect love story. Except he’s not. He’s the hypnotist’s love story. I’m the ex-girlfriend in the hypnotist’s love story. Not the heroine. I’m only a minor character.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“Ellen came out of the nursery from checking on Grace and said, “I love her so much it’s just…” “Excruciating,” supplied her mother. “I know. It doesn’t really get any better. You just learn to live with it.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“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.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“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.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“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.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“Sometimes she felt like she was always dragging the memories of these relationships along with her, like three old tin cans on a string.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“How do you make a man do something without nagging?” “That,” said Madeline, “is the billion-dollar question.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“Their carefully relaxed demeanors hid a fragile defensiveness, as if they expected to be criticized at any moment and they weren’t going to stand for it. They both seemed to cling so hard to their chosen personalities. I am this sort of person and therefore I believe this, I think this, I do this and I am right, I’m right, I’m sure I’m right!”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“she couldn’t stand to look up another profile on that awful internet dating site and find another middle-aged, bald, chubby man staring smugly at her out of the computer screen, demanding a ‘slim lady who takes care of herself, for snuggles and long walks along the beach’. Yes, she wanted this child to love her and approve of her and save her from snuggles with chubby, smug men.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“...life would go back to being unendurable, except-and this was the worst part-she would in fact endure it, it wouldn't kill her, she'd keep on living day after day after day, an endless loop of glorious sunrises and sunsets that Janie never got to see.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“I don’t know how she feels about me, but I sort of like her. I mean, I’m sickened by her existence obviously, but I find her strangely compelling.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“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.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“I was stunned. I'm not sure why. I think I just never expected him to be importante enough to make any significant changes in his life, but of course, he doesn't know that he's only a minor character in my life. He's the star of his own life, and I'm the minor character. and fair enough too.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“Had she just crossed the line”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“She remembered reading somewhere”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“It might be safer all round if Patrick said it first. And then he did.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story

“I’m not lonely. I’m just alone. I choose to be alone.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story