Top 160 Lucy Foley Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Just because the rest of us don’t wear our hearts on our sleeves, just because we have found a way of managing our feelings – it doesn’t mean they’re not there.”

— Lucy Foley

2. “She’s very striking-looking, beautiful, even, and her skin is pale pale pale in the way that only really looks good with black hair, like hers.”

— Lucy Foley

3. “I’ve always loved this time of year, Halloween especially. The chance to wallow in darkness after all the tedious cheerfulness and heat of the summer.”

— Lucy Foley

4. “It was then I thought of Corsica, the place we had discovered together. I craved the wind, the sun and salt, the simplicity of the island.”

— Lucy Foley

5. “The scales, as they say, have fallen from my eyes.”

— Lucy Foley

6. “Life is messy. We all know this. Terrible things happen, I learned that while I was still a child. But no matter what happens, life is only a series of days. You can’t control more than a single day. But you can control one of them. Twenty-four hours can be curated.”

— Lucy Foley

7. “These men are ex–public schoolboys. They’ve spent much of their lives being forced to follow a strict set of rules that probably didn’t end with their leaving school: choices around what university to attend, what job to do, what sort of house to live in. In my experience those who have the greatest respect for the rules also take the most enjoyment in breaking them.”

— Lucy Foley

8. “Some people, given just the right amount of pressure, taken out of their usual, comfortable environments, don’t need much encouragement at all to become monsters. And sometimes you just get a strong sense about people, and you can’t explain it; you simply know it, in some deeper part of yourself.”

— Lucy Foley

9. “That spring was the start of everything, for me. Before then, I might have been half-asleep, drifting through life.”

— Lucy Foley

10. “But no matter what happens, life is only a series of days. You can’t control more than a single day.”

— Lucy Foley

11. “The Bright Young People. The press love and hate them – they celebrate them, they vilify them, and they know full well that they would not shift nearly so many papers without them.”

— Lucy Foley

12. “Nowhere on earth could possibly live up to those halcyon days. But that’s nostalgia for you, the tyranny of those memories of childhood that feel so golden, so perfect.”

— Lucy Foley

13. “Here is a person held together by tape and glue and prescription-strength sleeping pills – the only thing I can be persuaded to make a foray into civilisation for, these days.”

— Lucy Foley

14. “I’m not interested in fashion for its own sake, but I respect the power of clothes, in creating the right optics.”

— Lucy Foley

15. “Sometimes solitude is the only way to regain your sanity.”

— Lucy Foley

16. “Remove all of the distractions, and here, in the silence and the solitude, the demons they have kept at bay catch up with them.”

— Lucy Foley

17. “We can do our family members down as much as we like. But the second an outsider insults them our blood seethes. At the end of the day I don’t like him – but I love him. And I see my own failures in him.”

— Lucy Foley

18. “And being around people – people carrying on with their lives, busy and messy, settling down, having children, getting married – just emphasizes how much my own has stalled, indefinitely. Perhaps forever.”

— Lucy Foley

19. “With the candles on the table, the space becomes a luminous cocoon.”

— Lucy Foley

20. “In many ways my life has been rather like a record of the lost and found. Perhaps all lives are like that.”

— Lucy Foley

21. “If I could cry it might all be better, but I can’t. It’s like an ability I’ve lost, like a language I’ve forgotten.”

— Lucy Foley

22. “But it’s all about the moment, a wedding. All about the day. It’s not really about the marriage at all, in spite of what everyone says.”

— Lucy Foley

23. “Some people, given just the right amount of pressure, taken out of their usual, comfortable environments, don’t need much encouragement at all to become monsters.”

— Lucy Foley

24. “And I’m not worried about it being haunted. I have my own ghosts. I carry them with me wherever I go.”

— Lucy Foley

25. “Marriage is about finding that person you know best in the world. Not how they take their coffee or what their favourite film is or the name of their first cat. It’s knowing on a deeper level. It’s knowing their soul.”

— Lucy Foley

26. “He’s passionate about food, is my husband. He can talk about a dish he’s thought up in the way that a great musician might rhapsodise about a composition. It stems from his childhood; he claims that it comes from not having any variety in his diet when he was young.”

— Lucy Foley

27. “Now the city is at its loveliest. The crowds of summer and autumn have gone, the air has a new freshness, the light has that pale-gold quality unique to this time of year. There have been several weeks of this weather now, without a drop of rain.”

— Lucy Foley

28. “When he broke up with me, he told me that he would love me forever. But that’s total crap. If you love someone, really, you don’t do anything to hurt them.”

— Lucy Foley

29. “But it is a lot easier to face the day when you know you won’t have to face other people and their happiness.”

— Lucy Foley

30. “But it’s possible to hate your body when you’re thin, too. To feel like it’s kept secrets from you. To feel like it’s let you down.”

— Lucy Foley

31. “The air is impressively warm and close, as thick as honey.”

— Lucy Foley

32. “The rage is growing inside me, overtaking the shock and grief. I can feel it blossoming up behind my ribs. It’s almost a relief, how it obliterates every other feeling in its path.”

— Lucy Foley

33. “It’s always like the first time with him – that haste, only better, now we know exactly what the other wants.”

— Lucy Foley

34. “It’s always better to get it out in the open – even if it seems shameful, even if you feel like people won’t understand.”

— Lucy Foley

35. “This is the first time he has been alone for such a long period of time. Not lonely: that emotion is a familiar friend. One of the things the last few years has taught him is how lonely it is possible to be while surrounded by an entire regiment of men.”

— Lucy Foley

36. “There’s another self that I sometimes feel I lost along the way. The girl who always stayed for one more drink, who loved a dance. I miss her, sometimes.”

— Lucy Foley

37. “There’s something illicit about it, just the two of us up here. Something reckless. Perhaps it’s being on top of the world with the steep drop beneath us – invisible but very much there – adding a frisson of excitement, making everything feel slightly freighted with danger. Or that we’re cloaked by darkness. That anything could happen up here and no one would know.”

— Lucy Foley

38. “He turns toward the voice. It is as though the darkness itself has spoken. But when he looks closer he can make her out – the very pale blonde hair first, gleaming in what little light there is, then the shimmering stuff of her dress.”

— Lucy Foley

39. “If I didn’t pay attention, one of those currents could grow into a huge riptide, destroying all my careful planning. And here’s another thing I’ve learned – sometimes the smallest currents are the strongest.”

— Lucy Foley

40. “But that’s the thing about old friends, isn’t it? Sometimes they don’t even realize that they no longer have anything in common. That maybe they don’t even like each other anymore.”

— Lucy Foley

41. “I think, in art, it is as noble a thing as to to try to make people happy, to help them escape, as it is to make them think. And perhaps more difficult.”

— Lucy Foley

42. “It is a dark place form which you can never quite return. It does something to you, the first time. An essential change somewhere deep in the soul, the amputation of something important. The first time is the worst, but with each death the soul is wounded further. After a while there is nothing left but scar tissue.”

— Lucy Foley

43. “But here the cold has a chance to get you properly in its grip.”

— Lucy Foley

44. “When I step outside the sun is just beginning to go down, spilling fire upon water. It tinges pink the mist that has begun to gather over the bog, that shields its secrets. This is my favourite hour.”

— Lucy Foley

45. “To signify class, good taste, the kind of breeding that cannot be bought.”

— Lucy Foley

46. “The rituals, the male bonding. When we get together there’s this kind of pack mentality. We get carried away.”

— Lucy Foley

47. “Perhaps it’s simply growing older. A sense that she doesn’t have to prove herself any longer, that she knows exactly who she is. I envy that.”

— Lucy Foley

48. “There are people who hold out for love, capital letters LOVE, and don’t stop until they’ve found it. There are those who give up because they don’t find it. Boom or bust – all or nothing. And then, perhaps in the majority, there are those who settle. And I think we’re the sensible ones. Because love doesn’t always mean longevity.”

— Lucy Foley

49. “War happens to people, one by one.’ That’s exactly it, you see. Until it happens to you, you have no way of understanding it, let alone imagining it. Until then, it is simply a monster under the bed.”

— Lucy Foley

50. “See, mine is a profession in which you orchestrate happiness... You can’t control more than a single day. But you can control one of them. Twenty four hours can be curated. A wedding day is a neat little parcel of time in which I can create something whole and perfect to be cherished for a lifetime, a pearl from a broken necklace.”

— Lucy Foley