Lucy Foley Quotes

Lucy Foley

Lucy Foley is a British author of contemporary, historical fiction and mystery novels. Her novels The Paris Apartment and The Guest List are New York Times best sellers. (Lucy Foley Quotes)

“And being around people – people carrying on with their lives, busy and messy, settling down, having children, getting married – just emphasizes how much my own has stalled, indefinitely. Perhaps forever.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“And I’m not worried about it being haunted. I have my own ghosts. I carry them with me wherever I go.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“And it’s so exciting to see someone’s dream come true.”
Lucy Foley
The Book of Lost and Found

“Because as long as the war is elsewhere, you can’t take it seriously. As Martha Gellhorn said “War is personal”. That’s right: until it happens to you, you can’t understand it, much less imagine it. Until it enters your life it is unreal.”
Lucy Foley
The Book of Lost and Found

“Begins to seem impossible. You try to forget, to move on. And sometimes, once you have gone through this painful process, by some peculiar alchemy, it happens.”
Lucy Foley
The Book of Lost and Found

“But he showed me how to be free. In a way, I wish that I could have learned it on my own – but sometimes we need another to show us our own bravery.”
Lucy Foley
The Invitation

“But here the cold has a chance to get you properly in its grip.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“But it is a lot easier to face the day when you know you won’t have to face other people and their happiness.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“But it’s all about the moment, a wedding. All about the day. It’s not really about the marriage at all, in spite of what everyone says.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“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
The Guest List

“But that’s nostalgia for you, the tyranny of those memories of childhood that feel so golden, so perfect.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“Each of us always carries with him what he was, the people we were are like layers that have grown one on top of the other.”
Lucy Foley
The Book of Lost and Found

“Even if you don’t have much interaction with other human beings – as I do not – it turns out that the instinct to judge one another, that basic human trait, does not leave us.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“Find your style with courage, because you have to be courageous when running alone.”
Lucy Foley
The Book of Lost and Found

“For me, those works were the artistic equivalent of a teenage diary: full of overblown sentiment and melodrama.”
Lucy Foley
The Book of Lost and Found

“He had sent her to the British school, which had a good standard of teaching. And at home, through his guidance, she had become as well-read as her brother. He liked to joke about this, tell her that her intellect shamed them all. But at some point, it seemed, he was content to let her grandmother and mother’s plans for her take over. Sometimes she feels that she has become a half-developed thing, a sort of freak. Too educated to be content with the usual lot of her sex, but not enough to do anything with it. At her most angry she decided that her education had been a pastime for her father, an amusement.”
Lucy Foley
Last Letter from Istanbul

“He has taken lives, many of them in fact. And not just animal. He knows better than anyone that it is not something to boast about. It is a dark place from which you can never quite return. It does something to you, the first time. An essential change somewhere deep in the soul, the amputation of something important. The first time is the worst, but with each death the soul is wounded further. After a while there is nothing left but scar tissue.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“Here is a person held together by tape and glue and prescription-strength sleeping pills – the only thing I can be persuaded to make a foray into civilization for, these days.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“Hope is a great thing, when there is still a chance of everything being OK. But in cases that are quite literally hopeless it can do much more damage than good.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“Humans are hunters, it’s in our very DNA. We need to find an outlet for those needs. The blood lust.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“I hate walking. It’s so boring, and purposeless. Give me a run any day, something that burns double the number of calories in half the time.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“I have seen dead bodies before in my time, in my old line of work. A greater number than the average person, definitely. But the horror of the experience never leaves you. It is always a shock – a profound, existential shock – to be confronted with the inanimate object that was once a person. A person so recently thinking, feeling, seeing, reduced to so much cold flesh.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“I suppose we all carry around different versions of ourselves.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“I think it often happens like this. You wait, and hope, until eventually the hoping seems in vain and the thing you wish for”
Lucy Foley
The Book of Lost and Found

“I think we carry all of our past selves with us, in tight layers. Somewhere within you is that girl, however many other, new selves you may have grown in the years since. She’s what holds you together, at the very center.” (Lucy Foley Quotes)
Lucy Foley
The Book of Lost and Found

“I think, in art, it is as noble a thing as to try to make people happy, to help them escape, as it is to make them think. And perhaps more difficult.”
Lucy Foley
The Invitation

“I want to cry like a kid as I stumble down to the beach, because it should hurt, my whole body should hurt, but no tears will come – I haven’t been able to make them come for a long time. If I could cry it might all be better, but I can’t. It’s like an ability I’ve lost, like a language I’ve forgotten.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

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

“I would take a big long swig of whatever vodka-and-something drink I was holding, until I felt the slide, the shift. And I’d understand why my mother seemed to use alcohol like medicine.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“I’m not interested in fashion for its own sake, but I respect the power of clothes, in creating the right optics.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“I’m not interested in fashion for its own sake, but I respect the power of clothes, in creating the right optics. I knew immediately that this dress was a queenmaker.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“I’m not necessarily the brightest penny in the till. But I don’t like being treated like a moron, either.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“I’m so used to giving talks to my employees that I have to work to keep the note of authority out of my voice. I know some women complain about not being able to get people to take them seriously. If anything, I have the opposite problem.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“I’ve planned this trip, so I feel a certain ownership of it – the anxiety that people won’t enjoy themselves, that things might go wrong. And also a sense of pride, already, in its small successes… like this, the wild beauty outside the window.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“If I didn’t pay attention, one of those currents could grow into a huge riptide, destroying all my careful planning. And here’s another thing I’ve learned – sometimes the smallest currents are the strongest.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“In friendship, as in love, opposites often attract. Extrovert and introvert, yin and yang.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“In many ways my life has been rather like a record of the lost and found. Perhaps all lives are like that.”
Lucy Foley
The Book of Lost and Found

“In my experience those who have the greatest respect for the rules also take the most enjoyment in breaking them.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“In the years since I’ve had kids – probably because I’m always with the kids – I’ve apparently become invisible to men. It only dawned on me, when I stopped feeling them on me, that I had taken men’s glances for granted. That I enjoyed them.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“Ironically, it was the thought of her that kept me alive until then. Thanks to that thought, I hadn’t lost my mind. I believed in her, in the future we would have lived together, just as others believe in God.”
Lucy Foley
The Book of Lost and Found

“It is a dark place from which you can never quite return. It does something to you, the first time. An essential change somewhere deep in the soul, the amputation of something important. The first time is the worst, but with each death the soul is wounded further. After a while there is nothing left but scar tissue.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“It was then I thought of Corsica, the place we had discovered together. I craved the wind, the sun and salt, the simplicity of the island.”
Lucy Foley
The Book of Lost and Found

“It’s always better to get it out in the open – even if it seems shameful, even if you feel like people won’t understand.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“It’s tricky – as anyone who has been in this situation will know – to be the latest addition to a group of old friends. It seems that I will always be the new girl, however many years pass. I will always be the last in, the trespasser.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“Life is messy. We all know this. Terrible things happen, I learned that while I was still a child. But no matter what happens, life is only a series of days. You can’t control more than a single day. But you can control one of them. Twenty-four hours can be curated.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“Love is what teenagers think has happened when actually they’re just stuffed full of hormones.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“Marriage is about finding that person you know best in the world. Not how they take their coffee or what their favorite film is or the name of their first cat. It’s knowing on a deeper level. It’s knowing their soul.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“My existence has been a catalog of things lost and found. But maybe that’s the way it is for everyone.”
Lucy Foley
The Book of Lost and Found

“Nature, who knows nothing of convention, has the audacity of a genius.”
Lucy Foley
The Invitation

“Now the city is at its loveliest. The crowds of summer and autumn have gone, the air has a new freshness, the light has that pale-gold quality unique to this time of year. There have been several weeks of this weather now, without a drop of rain.”
Lucy Foley
The Invitation

“Nowhere on earth could possibly live up to those halcyon days. But that’s nostalgia for you, the tyranny of those memories of childhood that feel so golden, so perfect.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“Nur once heard it said that a woman’s sphere is actually less constrained than a man’s. Because whilst he may travel outside in the physical world, her internal world is limitless, set only by the boundaries of her imagination. This life within the mind is a skill that men do not always take the time to learn… unless, perhaps, they are of a particularly spiritual bent.”
Lucy Foley
Last Letter from Istanbul

“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
The Hunting Party

“People are basically civilized animals. That the essential urges are hidden beneath a layer of social gloss; stifled, controlled. But at times of even fairly minor stress, the animal within has a go at breaking through. Some people, given just the right amount of pressure, taken out of their usual, comfortable environments, don’t need much encouragement at all to become monsters.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“Perhaps it’s simply growing older. A sense that she doesn’t have to prove herself any longer, that she knows exactly who she is. I envy that.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“Remove all of the distractions, and here, in the silence and the solitude, the demons they have kept at bay catch up with them.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“See, mine is a profession in which you orchestrate happiness. It is why I became a wedding planner. Life is messy. We all know this. Terrible things happen, I learned that while I was still a child. But no matter what happens, life is only a series of days. You can’t control more than a single day. But you can control one of them. Twenty-four hours can be curated. A wedding day is a neat little parcel of time in which I can create something whole and perfect to be cherished for a lifetime, a pearl from a broken necklace.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“She is completely at ease, dancing like this with the rest of us watching, sitting still. She’s so in tune with her body. I have always longed for that lack of inhibition. Because, really, isn’t that what dancing is? It isn’t about being particularly talented: not unless it’s something you do professionally. It’s more an ability to shake off your own self-consciousness. I have never been able to do that. It’s not really something you can learn to do. You either have it, or you don’t.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“She was the first to see my work, you know? She and she were the first to believe in me, to consider me an artist, not a boy with a dream.”
Lucy Foley
The Book of Lost and Found

“She would have carried the signs of time in her body and soul, maybe I wouldn’t even be able to see in her the woman I had loved. And that thought overwhelmed me.” (Lucy Foley Quotes)
Lucy Foley
The Book of Lost and Found

“So much of this whole wedding business, I have realised, is about how things appear. As long as we can make it through with all seeming joyful, jubilant… well, perhaps then we can suppress any darker forces stirring beneath the surface of the day.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“Some people, given just the right amount of pressure, taken out of their usual, comfortable environments, don’t need much encouragement at all to become monsters. And sometimes you just get a strong sense about people, and you can’t explain it; you simply know it, in some deeper part of yourself.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“Sometimes solitude is the only way to regain your sanity.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“That spring was the start of everything, for me. Before then, I might have been half-asleep, drifting through life.”
Lucy Foley
The Invitation

“That’s the thing about old friends, isn’t it? Sometimes they don’t even realise that they no longer have anything in common. That maybe they don’t even like each other anymore.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“That’s the thing about old friends. You just know these things about them. You have learned to love them. This is the glue that binds us together. It’s like family, I suppose. All that history. We know everything there is to know about one another.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“The air is impressively warm and close, as thick as honey.”
Lucy Foley
The Invitation

“The beauty of life is that it is up to each of us to decide what to do with it.”
Lucy Foley
The Book of Lost and Found

“The cake is quite something to behold. It should be. Tomorrow, of course, it will be destroyed. But it’s all about the moment, a wedding. All about the day. It’s not really about the marriage at all, in spite of what everyone says.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“The most precious memories, like delicate objects, are in danger of being wasted if they are handled too much.”
Lucy Foley
The Book of Lost and Found

“The rage is growing inside me, overtaking the shock and grief. I can feel it blossoming up behind my ribs. It’s almost a relief, how it obliterates every other feeling in its path.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“The rituals, the male bonding. When we get together there’s this kind of pack mentality. We get carried away.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“The scales, as they say, have fallen from my eyes.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“There are people who hold out for love, capital letters LOVE, and don’t stop until they’ve found it. There are those who give up because they don’t find it. Boom or bust – all or nothing. And then, perhaps in the majority, there are those who settle. And I think we’re the sensible ones.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“There is nothing like stirring a bit of jealousy to fire things up in a relationship.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“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
The Guest List

“There’s something exotic about being all dressed up with only other adults for company, a plentiful supply of booze, no responsibility.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“They are memories to be treated with delicacy so as not to dirty or crease them, like fragile objects that risk breaking if you handle them for too long.”
Lucy Foley
The Book of Lost and Found

“They say you spend your first year at university trying to shake off all the ‘friends’ you make in your first week, and that was true for me. After uni you spend the next few years winnowing those remaining friends down, realizing that you don’t have the time and energy to trek across London or indeed the country to see people who have barely anything in common with you anymore.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“This is the first time he has been alone for such a long period of time. Not lonely: that emotion is a familiar friend. One of the things the last few years has taught him is how lonely it is possible to be while surrounded by an entire regiment of men.”
Lucy Foley
Last Letter from Istanbul

“Trying to get drunk to assuage loneliness only ever makes you feel lonelier than before.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“War happens to people, one by one.’ That’s exactly it, you see. Until it happens to you, you have no way of understanding it, let alone imagining it. Until then, it is simply a monster under the bed.”
Lucy Foley
The Book of Lost and Found

“What’s that expression the French have for it? Jolie laide: ugly beautiful.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party

“When he broke up with me, he told me that he would love me forever. But that’s total crap. If you love someone, really, you don’t do anything to hurt them.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“When I step outside the sun is just beginning to go down, spilling fire upon water. It tinges pink the mist that has begun to gather over the bog, that shields its secrets. This is my favourite hour.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“When was the last time I abandoned myself to some music… when was the last time I had a really good dance? When was the last time I felt this desired, this bloody sexy? It feels like I lost that part of myself somewhere along the way. For these few hours I’m going to enjoy having it back.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

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

“With every other partner I’ve got bored in a matter of weeks, the sex has rather too quickly become pedestrian, a chore. With Will I feel like I am never quite sated – even when, in the baser sense, I am more sated than I have been with any other lover. It isn’t just about him being so beautiful – which he is, of course, objectively so. This insatiability is far deeper than that. I’m aware of a feeling of wanting to possess him. Of each sexual act being an attempt at a possession that is never quite achieved, some essential part of him always evading my reach, slipping beneath the surface.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“With the candles on the table, the space becomes a luminous cocoon”
Lucy Foley
The Invitation

“You don’t get this. This isn’t your moment. You didn’t create it. I created it in spite of you.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List

“You know, my friend, I have found that the best way to come to terms with one’s past is like this, through talk. It is painful, but, little by little, it helps to diffuse its power.”
Lucy Foley
The Invitation

“You learn all the insider secrets, doing this sort of work. You see the things no one else is privileged to see. All the gossip that the guests would kill to have. As a wedding planner you can’t afford to miss anything. You have to be alert to every detail, all the smaller eddies beneath the surface. If I didn’t pay attention, one of those currents could grow into a huge riptide, destroying all my careful planning. And here’s another thing I’ve learned – sometimes the smallest currents are the strongest.”
Lucy Foley
The Guest List