Big Little Truths Quotes

“The cursory way men spoke to each other! If this had been an exchange between two women, there would have been so many more sentences and explanations, emojis and double exclamation marks.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“If only you could trade in your body like an old car that was costing more money in repairs than it was worth.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“There was a complicated system at Ed’s oncologist’s office, where you were taken from the waiting room to another office and then the man himself—the king, the dictator, the person with the power to determine your future happiness, to decree exactly how your life would proceed, whether you could rebook your holiday, whether you would leave this office elated or distraught—swanned back and forth between offices, presumably so he never had to waste a precious second waiting for his patients—the commoners, the peasants—to take their seats.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“She told them there’s a new moral panic for every generation, and in the eighteenth century there was outrage about young women reading novels and ruining their posture. Now it’s smartphones and social media.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“That’s okay. You don’t need to divulge it,” said Adrian. If a group of teenagers found it, he assumed he might be able to as well, even given their obviously superior technology skills.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“Nothing would surprise her. A man’s cruelty terrified like a hammer, but a woman’s malevolence cut like a scalpel.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“It was one of those days from their childhood every student would remember: that sunny spring day when somebody gave their school principal the finger.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“the theater kids, who felt things deeply, wept and fainted, or did their best to faint.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“Just because Eve gave Adam the apple? The man was probably hungry. The woman was always in charge of organizing the fucking snacks.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“The age of consent is just an arbitrary number. How can something be wrong one day and right the next just because of a birthday?”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“She thought sadly of long-ago school events when Chloe’s face would light up with pleasure and relief when she caught sight of them. All the parents would be waving madly. You couldn’t relax until your kid had clocked your presence. Now you had to hide in case you embarrassed your children simply by virtue of your existence. Once, Madeline got into trouble for the way she clapped at a school assembly. Apparently “nobody else in the world” clapped like that.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“was so convenient to be in love with your husband. Affairs sounded like logistical nightmares and divorces were time-consuming and expensive, not to mention distressing.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“Celeste had come to realize that elderly parents and teenagers shared many of the same attributes. They were mercurial”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“Their children, meanwhile, were euphoric about this ghoulish interruption to their day, although some experienced nausea, and the theater kids, who felt things deeply, wept and fainted, or did their best to faint.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“That’s all a man had to do: decide to lose weight.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“It seemed like once you became a parent”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“Celeste had come to realize that elderly parents and teenagers shared many of the same attributes. They were mercurial, stubborn, and slightly unhinged. Everything about them felt precarious. At any moment they could slip and fall or develop an addiction. They could not be made to do anything they didn’t choose.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“that she could not control her children’s stories, that things would keep happening to them and they wouldn’t always be good, but part of her still instinctively felt like she could fix everything with the right antibiotic, a tutor, day surgery, whatever it took. Let me get on the phone”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“You can’t be dealing with her aging frontal lobe and your kids’ underdeveloped frontal lobes all at the same time. It’s a recipe for disaster.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“she had become so foolishly fixated on the idea that she should look amazing at her party, as if it were her last ever opportunity, as if she had something to prove to herself and the world. Look what I did with the leafy green vegetables and the protein with every meal, the cardio and the creams, the good sleep hygiene and constant hydration. This! This right here is the result of my hard work! Shower me with compliments, tell me I couldn't possibly be fifty, tell me I've still got it! Because when the clock strikes midnight, I might lose it all.
I might die.
It was nothing to worry about.
She wasn't even thinking about it!
She was thinking about it all the time. It buzzed like tinnitus.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“It seemed like once you became a parent, you could never relax, not for a moment, not for the rest of your life, because there was always too much to lose. The stakes just got higher and higher and you had less and less control.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“But they were mothers and could not enjoy the magic because they were normally the ones in charge of providing it.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you when you come home.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“Oh, yes, I know, although I’ve hardly had any yet!” said Skye regretfully. “But I may have a genetic tendency toward alcoholism because of my family history. So I probably won’t ever drink.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“She was at Celeste’s place for an early Sunday-night dinner and was busily cutting her chicken schnitzel into tiny cubes, presumably in the forlorn hope of making it disappear from her plate. Skye and Josh had cooked dinner together and there had been a lot of focus on the playlist rather than the food, so the schnitzel was overcooked.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“It was like dealing with a teen: You had to remind yourself that this was the hormones talking. Everyone was at the mercy of their biology and what they put into their body. It’s the hormones. The dementia. The alcohol. The drugs. The grief. The childhood.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“Everything has a side effect! It’s like the Law of Unintended Consequences.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“When the conversation snagged on details that everyone remembered differently, Melody made some wise points, along the lines of how history was a matter of constant reinterpretation, how a person’s present views might affect how they interpreted the past, but when she started to talk about how a good historian referred to multiple sources, they got bored and hurried her along.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“seemed like once you became a parent, you could never relax, not for a moment, not for the rest of your life, because there was always too much to lose. The stakes just got higher and higher and you had less and less control.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths

“Jane was nineteen when she got pregnant with Ziggy. Correction: when my husband got her pregnant. Precision was a professional habit. Celeste constantly revised her legal commentary to ensure that no interpretation other than the correct one was possible. It was harder in real life. So many possible interpretations.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Truths