Top 180 Lucy Foley Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

107. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

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

— 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. “I am only rather sorry I didn’t get the chance to plunge the knife in myself.”

— 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. “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

116. “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

117. “He must have done, I suppose.”

— Lucy Foley

118. “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

119. “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

120. “I look down at the spilled contents, shining gold tubes of mascara and lipsticks rolling in a bid for freedom across the floorboards, an overturned compact leaking a trail of bronzing powder.”

— Lucy Foley

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

125. “From the beginning, from the moment I stepped foot in this building, the others have held all the cards. Now I’ve got one of my own. Just one, but maybe it’s an ace. And I’m going to use it.”

— 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. “And if anyone was going to make it I’d been so sure it would be Ben Daniels. If he couldn’t, what hope was there for the rest of us?”

— Lucy Foley

128. “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

129. “Drawn to it the same way, I suppose, that a self-harmer is drawn to run the razor blade over the skin of their wrist.”

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

132. “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

133. “That night in Amsterdam. It was the worst, most shameful thing I had ever done. It was the best thing that had ever happened to me. That was how I used to see it, anyway. Until he came to stay.”

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

135. “In my opinion, families are overrated.”

— Lucy Foley

136. “I’ve never let a door stay closed for long: I suppose you could say that’s my main problem in life.”

— Lucy Foley

137. “I couldn’t help myself, you know? That family. Everything we never had. I wanted to be part of it. I wanted them to love me. And at the same time, I wanted to destroy them. Partly for living off women who might have been Mum, at one stage in her life. But also, I suppose, just because I could.”

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

139. “As I say, this job may have its small losses of dignity. But it does not involve shame.”

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

141. “But then I have also spent many evenings alone here over the years. I suppose I’m not unlike other women of my social standing. Left to rattle around in their huge apartments while their husbands are away – with their mistresses, caught up in their work.”

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

143. “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

144. “Theo plays the recording again. And finally a third time. Here it is. Here’s the proof. Someone was there in the apartment with Ben, the night he left this voicenote.”

— Lucy Foley

145. “Sometimes, when I’ve got a stick of charcoal or a paintbrush in my hand, it feels like the only time I’m complete. The only way I can speak properly.”

— Lucy Foley

146. “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

147. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

149. “I am feeling envious of a seventeen-year-old who no longer exists.”

— Lucy Foley

150. “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