Top 160 Lucy Foley Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

106. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

108. “Once, when she got drunk, she went on about how kids had got at her at school for being “chubby.” She’s always making comments about my weight, like she doesn’t know I’ve always been skinny, ever since I was a little girl. 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

109. “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

110. “Ah, so he didn’t tell her anything about what went down. I’m not surprised. I probably wouldn’t if I were him, come to think of it. The less said about all of that the better. Let’s hope he’s decided to let bygones be bygones on that front. Poor bloke. It wasn’t my idea, all of that.”

— Lucy Foley

111. “I see him look us over. I don’t think he likes what he sees. Is that a sneer, as he takes in Nick’s spotless Barbour coat, Samira’s Hunter wellies, Miranda’s fox-fur collar? If so, who knows what he makes of my city dweller’s clothes and wheeled Samsonite.”

— Lucy Foley

112. “To others gardening is a form of creative abandon. To me it is a way of exerting control upon my surroundings.”

— Lucy Foley

113. “But I wasn’t about to complain; we could never have afforded a florist of our choice. I wonder what it must be like to have the money to do exactly what you want.”

— Lucy Foley

114. “It’s a beautiful building, but there’s something rotten at its heart. Now he’s discovered it he can smell the stench of it everywhere.”

— Lucy Foley

115. “But I suppose an outsider might assume he was a boxer or something similarly pugilistic, rather than a very successful property developer.”

— Lucy Foley

116. “So to luck. And to making your own luck... or giving it a little helping hand, when it needs it.”

— Lucy Foley

117. “He must have done, I suppose.”

— Lucy Foley

118. “So. It’s why I tried so very hard to get you here,’ she says. ‘Why I offered that ridiculous discount to be featured in your wife’s magazine. I would have expected her to question it a little more than she did. But I suppose that’s why she’s so well suited to you. Entitled enough to believe that the world simply owes her something. She must have realised that there would be no way we could make a profit from it. But I am getting something out of it, so it happens.”

— Lucy Foley

119. “Trying not to poke myself in the eye with the rosemary. I wonder how everyone else with a gin and tonic is managing it without injuring themselves. Maybe that’s a thing that you get taught at private school – how to drink cocktails with unwieldy garnishes.”

— Lucy Foley

120. “I tune back in to the others. I feel like I’m coming up from underwater.”

— Lucy Foley

121. “I think of Will at the rehearsal dinner. Did we meet at the engagement drinks? You seem familiar. I must have seen you in one of Jules’s photos. When he said he recognised me, he didn’t recognise me. He recognised Alice.”

— Lucy Foley

122. “And here’s another thing I’ve learned – sometimes the smallest currents are the strongest.”

— Lucy Foley

123. “Dad’s not a fan of celebrities, of anyone making their fortune by anything other than proper hard graft. He’s a proudly self-made man.”

— Lucy Foley

124. “I can see the lights of the mainland in the distance like a trail of spilled glitter in the blackness.”

— Lucy Foley

125. “Aoife also offered a 50 per cent discount if I held it here. She might look dowdy but she’s savvy. That’s how she clinched it. She knows I’ll feature it in the magazine now, knows it’ll get press because of Will. It’ll pay dividends in the end.”

— Lucy Foley

126. “He’s right. I can’t think of the last time we ate out, other than that. Money has been a bit tight and you have to add the cost of a babysitter on top of the meal. But I wish he hadn’t said it.”

— Lucy Foley

127. “I need a proper coat. But there’s always been a lot of things I need that I’m never going to get.”

— Lucy Foley

128. “I have always, always got a plan; have done ever since I was little.”

— Lucy Foley

129. “The band stop their playing.”

— Lucy Foley

130. “And then I’ll segue neatly into my whole routine- about how, when you think about it, in the times we live in we are all stalkers. All of us knowing so much about one another’s lives. Even people we haven’t seen in years. Old childhood friends, old schoolmates. I’ll talk about how we all submit to being stalked. How we think that we’re in control, sharing what we think we choose to share, but really putting a lot more out there than we’re aware of.”

— Lucy Foley

131. “If doing your own make-up is good enough for Kate Middleton, it’s good enough for me.”

— Lucy Foley

132. “None of us had realized quite how fragile Alice was. She had always seemed so capable, so in control: getting all those amazing grades, playing on the sports teams, getting her place at university, never missing a trick. But underneath that, fuelling all this success, was a tangled mass of anxiety that none of us saw until it was too late.”

— Lucy Foley

133. “I don’t know how I saw it, it being so dark. But it is hardwired into us, I think, into our animal selves. Our eyes are alert to any disturbance, any change in the pattern of the darkness.”

— Lucy Foley

134. “Here was the problem with staying in other peoples’ houses. Nothing was quite as you would have it yourself.”

— Lucy Foley

135. “Her skills as an actress have always seemed to come to the fore in real life rather than on the stage.”

— Lucy Foley

136. “It’s so very like you, isn’t it? The elegant exterior, the cheap grubby reality inside.”

— Lucy Foley

137. “I was sometimes drawn to men like this. The reticent, brooding sort: the challenge of drawing them out, making them care.”

— Lucy Foley

138. “And then the lights go out.”

— Lucy Foley

139. “I could not explain that I simply wanted someone to love. Wholehearted, unreserved, requited.”

— Lucy Foley

140. “There’s something reckless about her – it feels as though she might do anything. Unpredictable. Dangerous. And given this morning’s outing she’s clearly got issues with the police.”

— Lucy Foley

141. “But then attraction never really goes away, does it?”

— Lucy Foley

142. “Besides, hikers are all bright windbreakers and cellophane-wrapped lunches and earnestness, not the sort to callously litter the landscape they’ve come to enjoy.”

— Lucy Foley

143. “And he’s settled in his career, too. If I had anything to do with it he’d be gunning for a deputy head position. There’s nothing less sexy than a lack of ambition, is there?”

— Lucy Foley

144. “While Alice, a million times brighter and better than him – my clever, brilliant sister – never got her chance.”

— Lucy Foley

145. “Top herself?’ Duncan shouts, ‘Yeah, I do. She’s been acting funny since we arrived, hasn’t she? Clearly a bit of a basket case. Wouldn’t put it past her to have done something stup –.”

— Lucy Foley

146. “I mean, in a way it was crazy good. i’ve never had so much action with so many different women as when I joined those apps, not even at uni. I had to get myself tested every couple of weeks.”

— Lucy Foley

147. “You didn’t have to continue trying to get acting jobs, I think. If you’d really wanted to put food on the table that probably wasn’t the most sensible way to do it. We didn’t have to spend your tiny income on an apartment off Shaftesbury Avenue in Zone One and not be able to afford to eat as a result. It’s not my fault you made some bad decisions when you were a teenager and got yourself knocked up.”

— Lucy Foley

148. “I don’t like the sound of that, either. I’m laughing along with the others. But I’m secretly bracing myself. I want to stand up and say my own piece, as though she’s the prosecuting barrister, and I’m the defence. That’s not how you’re meant to feel, listening to a speech from a loved one, is it?”

— Lucy Foley

149. “I want to tell her to wipe off the lipstick and eyeliner, to stay in that safe childhood space for a while longer.”

— Lucy Foley

150. “But no matter what happens, life is only a series of days.”

— Lucy Foley