Liane Moriarty

“We should have given up years ago. It's so clear now. We should have "explored other options." We should have adopted. We gave up years of our lives and we very nearly destroyed our marriage. Our happy ending could have and should have arrived so much sooner. 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.”

“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.”

“She had always thought that exquisitely happy time at the beginning of her relationship with Nick was the ultimate, the feeling they'd always be trying to replicate, to get back, but now she realized that was wrong. That was like comparing sparkling mineral water to French champagne. Early love is exciting and exhilarating. It's light and bubbly. Anyone can love like that. But love 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 a love is ineffable. It deserves its own word.”

“The suffragettes didn't starve themselves for the vote, so that you girls could starve yourselves for a man.”

“Nick explained that an aperitif was an pre-dinner drink. Nick came from an aperitif-drinking family. Alice came from a family with one dusty bottle of Baileys sitting hopefully in the back of the pantry with the tins of spaghetti.”

“I'd be at work where poeple respected my opinions, said Nick. And then, I'd come home and it was like I was the village idiot.”

“I have no right to be sad about anything. No right to have therapy from expensive doctors like you for losing children who never existed. There is real grief in the world. There are real mothers losing real children.”

“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?”

“I'm sure it's innate, it's just biology, for a man to want a woman who can give him children.”

“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.”

“Finally she stopped resisting and called a truce. Young Alice was allowed to stay as long as she didn't eat too much chocolate.”

“The medication, the hormones and the relentless frustrations of our lives make us bitchy and you're not allowed to be bitchy in public or people won't like you.”

“That's what's so embarrassing about all this. Each time I sobbed for a lost baby, it was like sobbing over the end of a relationship when I'd never even gone out with the guy. My babies weren't babies. They were just microscopic clusters of cells that weren't ever going to be anything else. they were just my own desperate hopes. Dream babies. And people have to give up on dreams.”

“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.”

“I can hardly bear to think of ourselves hugging and crying and making giggly phone calls, like we were in some inane sitcom. We actually discussed names. Names! I want to shout back through the years at myself, "Just because you're pregnant doesn't mean you get a baby, you idiots!”

“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.”

“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.”

“We were so happy.”

“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.”

“Alice would give anything, anything at all, to be lying in bed with Nick, waiting for a cup of tea. Maybe he got sick of making her cups of tea? Was that it? Had she taken him for granted? Who did she think she was, some sort of princess, lying in bed waiting for cups of tea to be delivered.”

“He got Alice, the way we did, or maybe even more so than us. 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.”

“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.”