Top 160 Lucy Foley Quotes (2024 Update)
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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. “This was the most tender rack of lamb, velvet on the tongue, crushed potatoes scented with rosemary. It was perfect.”

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

104. “He put his hand on my shoulder because he can. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it. But it felt like a reminder that he is the one in charge, that I am working for him. That I must dance to his tune.”

— Lucy Foley

105. “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

106. “In a strange way, it feels as though much of the evening since we got interrupted earlier has been a kind of foreplay. Feeling the gaze of the others upon us: envious, awed. Seeing in their reactions to us how good we look together. And yes, the hurt of having crossed a line with Charlie and being rebuffed. Maybe he’ll hear us.”

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

108. “He must have done, I suppose.”

— Lucy Foley

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

112. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

114. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

116. “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

117. “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

118. “To crawl, as Theo put it, back into the belly of the beast, I’d thought it sounded melodramatic when he said it but when I stand at the gate and look up at it, it feels right. Like this place, this building, is some huge creature ready to swallow me whole.”

— Lucy Foley

119. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

121. “The band stop their playing.”

— Lucy Foley

122. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

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

— 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. “And then the lights go out.”

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

132. “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

133. “It was the worst, most shameful thing I had ever done. It was the best thing that had ever happened to me.”

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

135. “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

136. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

144. “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

145. “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

146. “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

147. “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

148. “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

149. “Wounds inflicted at that sort of raw, unformed time in our lives tend to cut the deepest – and leave the worst scars.”

— Lucy Foley

150. “Not before I had begun half hating that little girl with everything she didn’t even know she had.”

— Lucy Foley