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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

113. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

115. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

118. “Far better to have a second wife who could never make him feel inferior, who came from somewhere so far beneath him that she would always be grateful. Someone he could mould as he chose. And I was so happy to be moulded. To become Madame Sophie Meunier with her silk scarves and diamond earrings. I could leave that place far behind. I wouldn’t end up like some of the others. Like the poor wretch who had given birth to my daughter.”

— Lucy Foley

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “Two revelations in one night.”

— Lucy Foley

123. “And I am unprepared, despite knowing what I have come to see. I have been ambushed, here in this place, by death. I thought that I could outrun it.”

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

125. “When you’ve got your heart set on someone Brad Pitt could walk in and he wouldn’t be enough.”

— Lucy Foley

126. “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

127. “A pathetic thing to hope, but there you have it. I’ve always had to hunt for scraps where paternal affection’s concerned.”

— 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. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley

132. “He must have done, I suppose.”

— Lucy Foley

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

136. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

138. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

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

— Lucy Foley

144. “The band stop their playing.”

— Lucy Foley

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

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

— Lucy Foley

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

— Lucy Foley