The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“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.” (The Hunting Party Quotes)
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party
“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
“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
“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 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’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
“In friendship, as in love, opposites often attract. Extrovert and introvert, yin and yang.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party
It is a dark place form 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’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
“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
“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
“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’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 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
“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
“Trying to get drunk to assuage loneliness only ever makes you feel lonelier than before.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party
“What’s that expression the French have for it? Jolie laide: ugly beautiful.”
Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party
