The Paris Apartment Quotes

“It’s not about where you came from. What kind of shit might have happened to you in the past. It’s about who you are. What you do with the opportunities life presents to you.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“But that’s what being poor does to you; it shortens your childhood. It hardens your ambition.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“I could not explain that I simply wanted someone to love. Wholehearted, unreserved, requited.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“There’s this expression in French. Être bien dans sa peau. To feel good in your own skin.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“You know, I read somewhere that sixty percent of us can’t go more than ten minutes without lying. Little slippages: to make ourselves sound better, more attractive, to others. White lies to avoid causing offence. So it’s not like I’ve done anything out of the ordinary. It’s only human.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“We can do our family members down as much as we like. But the second an outsider insults them our blood seethes. At the end of the day I don’t like him – but I love him. And I see my own failures in him.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“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, The Paris Apartment

“I only hope she knows what she's doing. Climbing so high, so quickly: it only makes for further to fall.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“When I married Jacques I understood it as an exchange. My youth and beauty for his wealth. Over the years, as is the way with this particular kind of contract, my worth only diminished as his increased.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“To others gardening is a form of creative abandon. To me it is a way of exerting control upon my surroundings.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“didn’t realise at the time how cheaply I had been bought. I didn’t free myself when I married my husband, as I’d thought. I didn’t elevate myself. I did the exact opposite. I married my pimp: I chained myself to him for life. Perhaps my daughter did the very thing I hadn’t had the courage to do.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“For so many years my insignificance and invisibility have been a mask I can hide behind. And in the process I have avoided raking up the past. Raking up the shame.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“She looks rich. Not flashy rich. The French equivalent of posh. You don’t have hair that perfect unless you spend your days doing basically nothing.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“It was the worst, most shameful thing I had ever done. It was the best thing that had ever happened to me.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“I find myself gripping the pendant of my necklace. It’s a St. Christopher: Mum gave us both one, to keep us safe—even if that was her job, not something to be outsourced to a little metal saint.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“La voix du sang est la plus forte. (The voice of blood is strongest.)”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“I've never let a door stay closed for long: I suppose you could say that's my main problem in life.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“It’s so very like you, isn’t it? The elegant exterior, the cheap grubby reality inside.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“He laughed. ‘She could eye-fuck a statue. And it was convenient for me to be able to distract your husband from the fact that I was lusting after his wife.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“An ageing wife is one thing; a fat wife is another.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“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, The Paris Apartment

“To signify class, good taste, the kind of breeding that cannot be bought.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“Paris you can live in the most luxurious apartment and the scum of the city will still wash up at your door on occasion. The drug addicts, the vagrants. The whores. Pigalle, the red-light district, lies just a little way away, clinging to the coattails of Montmartre.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“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, The Paris Apartment

“But also, I watch. I see everything. And it gives me a strange kind of power, even if I’m the only one who’s aware of it.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“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, The Paris Apartment

“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, The Paris Apartment

“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, The Paris Apartment

“What a surprise, he’s not here when the shit hits the fan.’ Antoine gives a laugh, but there’s no humour in it.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment

“He was a chameleon, an enigma. I had no idea, really, who I had invited under this roof, into the bosom of my family.”
― Lucy Foley, The Paris Apartment