The Hunting Party Quotes

“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

“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

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

“Sometimes solitude is the only way to regain your sanity.”
― 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

“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 civilisation for, these days.”
― 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

“But that’s the thing about old friends, isn’t it? Sometimes they don’t even realize that they no longer have anything in common. That maybe they don’t even like each other anymore.”
― 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.”
― 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

“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

“Sometimes these impulses overtake me -- the urge to push things a bit further... even the urge to wound. I can't stop myself, it's like a compulsion.”
― Lucy Foley, The Hunting Party

“Wounds inflicted at that sort of raw, unformed time in our lives tend to cut the deepest - and leave the worst scars.”
― Lucy Foley, The Hunting Party

“a friend she can be bad enough. The thought of having her as an enemy is frankly terrifying.”
― Lucy Foley, The Hunting Party

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

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

“Besides, there can’t be any real harm in not saying anything. Can there?”
― Lucy Foley, The Hunting Party

“And the ones like me, the mousy nobodies, we don’t always turn out to be the heroes of the tale. Sometimes we have our own dark secrets.”
― Lucy Foley, The Hunting Party

“Feridas infligidas (...) em épocas ainda virgens das nossas vidas tendem a ser bem profundas - e deixam as piores cicatrizes.”
― Lucy Foley, The Hunting Party

“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, 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.”
― Lucy Foley, The Hunting Party

“And I feel the question expired on my lips.”
― Lucy Foley, The Hunting Party

“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, The Hunting Party

“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, The Hunting Party

“I’m not saying that I have a drinking problem; I don’t. But I don’t ever drink for pleasure. I do it out of necessity. I use it as another painkiller: to blunt the edge of things, to alleviate the chronic, aching torment of memory.”
― Lucy Foley, The Hunting Party

“Jamie believed that people are basically civilized animals. That the essential urges are hidden beneath a layer of social gloss; stifled, controlled.”
― Lucy Foley, The Hunting Party

“as pessoas são basicamente animais civilizados. Que os instintos básicos ficam escondidos sob uma camada de verniz social; sufocados, controlados. Mas que, em momentos de estresse, mesmo não tão grandes, nosso animal interior tem a chance de irromper.”
― Lucy Foley, The Hunting Party

“They seemed almost at times like actors, I thought, making a great show of what a wonderful time they were having. They laughed a little too hard. They drank a great deal too much. And at the same time, despite all this evidence of merriment, they seemed to watch each other. Perhaps it’s hindsight, making this impression seem like more than it was. I suppose there are probably tensions in most groups of friends. But I was struck by the thought that they did not seem completely comfortable in one another’s company. Which was odd, as they’d told me right at the beginning that they were very old friends. But 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 any more.”
― 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

“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