Top 160 Lucy Foley Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “In my experience, those who have the greatest respect for the rules also take the most enjoyment in breaking them.”

— Lucy Foley

53. “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

54. “You know, I read somewhere that sixty percent of us can’t go more than ten minutes without lying. Little slippages: to make ourselves sound better, more attractive, to others. White lies to avoid causing offence. So it’s not like I’ve done anything out of the ordinary. It’s only human.”

— Lucy Foley

55. “Besides, there can’t be any real harm in not saying anything. Can there?”

— Lucy Foley

56. “Sometimes,’ I say, ‘I think it’s too difficult to tell the people closest to you. The ones you love.”

— Lucy Foley

57. “You know, my friend, I have found that the best way to come to terms with one’s past is like this, through talk. It is painful, but, little by little, it helps to diffuse its power.”

— Lucy Foley

58. “If I can’t move heaven, then I shall raise hell.”

— Lucy Foley

59. “What’s that expression the French have for it? Jolie laide: ugly beautiful.”

— Lucy Foley

60. “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.”

— Lucy Foley

61. “I’m fascinated by – and a little bit suspicious of – people who have made loads of money. To me they’re like another species altogether, a breed of sleek and dangerous big cats.”

— Lucy Foley

62. “Jamie believed that people are basically civilized animals. That the essential urges are hidden beneath a layer of social gloss; stifled, controlled.”

— Lucy Foley

63. “I feel the rage, almost comforting in its familiarity, blossoming up inside of me and obliterating everything else in its wake.”

— Lucy Foley

64. “Actually, I know this place better than they think. It is more familiar to me in some ways than any other place I have known in my life. And I’m not worried about it being haunted. I have my own ghosts. I carry them with me wherever I go.”

— Lucy Foley

65. “Sometimes these impulses overtake me – the urge to push things a bit further... even the urge to wound. I can’t stop myself, it’s like a compulsion.”

— Lucy Foley

66. “But that’s what being poor does to you; it shortens your childhood. It hardens your ambition.”

— Lucy Foley

67. “You are one of the reasons I chose to have my wedding here, in Ireland. Because I know how much you value that heritage, I value it too. I wish it didn’t matter to me, what you think. But it bloody does. So you’re going to walk me up the aisle. That’s the very least you can do. You can walk me up that aisle and look bloody delighted for me, every step of the way.”

— Lucy Foley

68. “We wouldn’t have worked. We’re friends, good friends. You know that.’ At that I feel him pulling away from me, retreating from the cliff edge.”

— Lucy Foley

69. “It’s tricky – as anyone who has been in this situation will know – to be the latest addition to a group of old friends.”

— Lucy Foley

70. “There are always secrets around the fringes of a wedding. I hear the things said in confidence, the bitchy remarks, the gossip. I heard some of the best man’s words in the cave.”

— Lucy Foley

71. “I’m not saying that I have a drinking problem; I don’t. But I don’t ever drink for pleasure. I do it out of necessity. I use it as another painkiller: to blunt the edge of things, to alleviate the chronic, aching torment of memory.”

— Lucy Foley

72. “She looks rich. Not flashy rich. The French equivalent of posh. You don’t have hair that perfect unless you spend your days doing basically nothing.”

— Lucy Foley

73. “But around my family I find myself regressing, letting all the old pettiness and envy and hurt come rushing back until I am teenage Jules, plotting to get away. I must be bigger than this. I have forged my own path. I have built it all on my own, something stable and powerful. And this weekend is a statement of that. My victory march.”

— Lucy Foley

74. “In the centre of everything stands the huge cake. It has appeared whole and perfect before them for most of the day, its train of sugar foliage glittering beneath the lights. But only minutes before the lights went out the guests gathered around to watch its ceremonial disembowelling. Now the deep red sponge gapes from within.”

— Lucy Foley

75. “When I married Jacques I understood it as an exchange. My youth and beauty for his wealth. Over the years, as is the way with this particular kind of contract, my worth only diminished as his increased.”

— Lucy Foley

76. “They’re a family. They’re a family. And this isn’t Ben’s apartment: not really. Right now I’m sitting here inside someone’s family home. Why on earth didn’t Ben tell me this? Did it not seem important? Did he somehow not know?”

— Lucy Foley

77. “If you love someone, really, you don’t so anything to hurt them.”

— Lucy Foley

78. “God, it’s all too disgusting to contemplate. Did he think about her, when we slept together? Did he think I was too stupid to ever guess? He must have done, I suppose. And he was right. That’s one more small part of what makes it so insulting.”

— Lucy Foley

79. “You didn’t miss much,’ a man – slender, dark red hair – swoops into the conversation. ‘Just a load of bitches burning their tits off and gossiping over bottles of Whispering Angel. Goodness,’ he says, giving me a once-over before bending in to kiss my cheek. ‘Don’t you scrub up well?’ ‘Er – thanks.”

— Lucy Foley

80. “Hundreds, perhaps even thousands of pounds’ worth of silk and lace. The sort of lingerie that is not meant to be worn under clothes, that is meant only to grace your flesh for a few minutes before it is whipped off.”

— Lucy Foley

81. “He was a chameleon, an enigma. I had no idea, really, who I had invited under this roof, into the bosom of my family.”

— Lucy Foley

82. “I didn’t believe in love at first sight until I saw Callum, across the bar at Fresher’s week, this boy with black curls and beautiful blue eyes. He gave me a sort of slow smile and it was like I knew him. Like we had always meant to come together, to find each other.”

— Lucy Foley

83. “There is nothing here to tell you about the man who inhabits the room, unless the nothing is in itself a clue to something. It has the anonymity of a prison cell.”

— Lucy Foley

84. “But also, I watch. I see everything. And it gives me a strange kind of power, even if I’m the only one who’s aware of it.”

— Lucy Foley

85. “And there is a pack feeling about them, like dogs that might behave well on their own but, once all together, don’t have their own minds. I’ll have to keep my eye on them tomorrow, make sure they don’t get carried away.”

— Lucy Foley

86. “Even though I wouldn’t change any of it, I’ve wondered whether we missed out on a couple more years of carefree fun. 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

87. “You better look after my daughter. You better not feck this up. And if you do anything to hurt my girl – well, it’s simple. I’ll come for you.”

— Lucy Foley

88. “An ageing wife is one thing; a fat wife is another.”

— Lucy Foley

89. “And most people don’t realize how much more they have than they need. They are lazy, and greedy, and blind to how easy their lives are. Perhaps it isn’t their fault. Perhaps they merely haven’t had the opportunity to see how fragile their grip on happiness is. But sometimes he thinks he hates them all.”

— Lucy Foley

90. “I only hope she knows what she’s doing. Climbing so high, so quickly: it only makes for further to fall.”

— Lucy Foley

91. “There’s nothing less sexy than a lack of ambition, is there?”

— Lucy Foley

92. “But that’s nostalgia for you, the tyranny of those memories of childhood that feel so golden, so perfect.”

— Lucy Foley

93. “Once he was stuck just outside Edinburgh on a train for four hours, because of an electrical fault. “You saw straightaway which people would eat you,” he told me, “without any hesitation, if you were stuck on a lifeboat together.”

— Lucy Foley

94. “Here’s the truth my mother won’t speak: if I hadn’t known what I wanted, and worked out how to get it, I wouldn’t have got anywhere. I had to learn how to get my way. Because my mother wasn’t going to be any bloody help.”

— Lucy Foley

95. “And I find myself wondering whether, since the kids, I feel different to Charlie, or whether he fancies me as much now my boobs are not the same boobs they were before breastfeeding, now I have all this strange slack skin on my belly. I know I shouldn’t ask, because my body has performed a miracle; two in fact. And yet it is important for a couple to still desire each other, isn’t it?”

— Lucy Foley

96. “Maybe it’s Jules’s influence: she’s a stylish lady herself and you can imagine her marching him into a shop. But you can’t imagine him minding much either.”

— Lucy Foley

97. “The local boy and the posh girl. Still, my stomach twists as Jules continues.”

— Lucy Foley

98. “She didn’t come to the hen do even though there was a room free in the villa for her. It did look odd –.”

— Lucy Foley

99. “He’s kind of attractive, if you like your men rough around the edges.”

— Lucy Foley

100. “For so many years my insignificance and invisibility have been a mask I can hide behind. And in the process I have avoided raking up the past. Raking up the shame.”

— Lucy Foley