Top 160 Lucy Foley Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 3 of 4

101. “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

102. “After uni you spend the next few years winnowing those remaining friends down, realizing that you don’t have the energy to trek across London or indeed the country to see people who have barely anything in common with you anymore.”

— Lucy Foley

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

109. “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

110. “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

111. “Look, okay, I know I’m attractive. Very attractive. There, I’ve said it. Do you hate me now? Anyway, I don’t need it confirmed by some potbellied construction workers who would catcall anyone with a short skirt or tight top. If anything, they cheapen it.”

— Lucy Foley

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

120. “I had always felt, ever since Jamie and I got together, that it was too good, that we were too lucky. That happiness like this couldn’t possibly last: we were using up more than our allotted quota of the stuff, and at some point someone had to notice.”

— Lucy Foley

121. “Will’s always been the centre of everything, the anchor of the group, all of us revolving round him. Good at sport, good enough grades – with a bit of extra help here and there. Everyone liked him. And I guess it seemed effortless, as though he didn’t work for anything. If you.”

— Lucy Foley

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

130. “The band stop their playing.”

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

132. “He trusts you to be able to handle the situation on your own,’ Sophie says. ‘But perhaps that is simply too much to ask. Look at you. You’re a forty-year-old man still living under his roof, leeching off his money. He has given you everything. You’ve never had to grow up. You’ve had everything handed to you by your father on a silver platter. You’re both useless hothouse flowers, too weak for the outside world. Unable to fly the nest.”

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

134. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

136. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

138. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

140. “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

141. “I take a big swig of my champagne. I remind myself that they were teenagers. That I am feeling envious of a seventeen-year-old who no longer exists.”

— Lucy Foley

142. “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

143. “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

144. “Part of the well-oiled machinery of the day. Less worthy of proper notice, really, than the chic arrangements of greenery, the wavering flames atop the silver candlesticks.”

— Lucy Foley

145. “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

146. “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

147. “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

148. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

150. “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