Brooke Lea Foster > Quotes

“I think every person you meet has something they can teach you, whether it's good or bad.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“A dress is just a dress if you don't know how to inhabit it.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“She heard her mother, the day she left for Wellesley: Some people play the slots. Others put their money into a house. Well, I don’t have any money at all, so I’m investing in you.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“Women in the movies got men interested in them by taking charge. Instead, Heddy tended to wish men would want to know her, sense her quickening pulse, note her cheerfulness or the way she twisted her earring as she imagined kissing them. But men never looked that hard, she supposed.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“Heddy could see that money couldn’t fix a person. It couldn’t save someone, or serve as a Band-Aid to whatever wounds a person carried around. It helped keep the lights on and the radiators humming, but it didn’t make anyone happier. Whatever had hurt Heddy as a child would always be with her, no matter how much education she received or how high her social standing climbed.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“She wasn’t telling Heddy to be someone else. She was telling her to edit. To omit. To figure out the parts of herself she was proud of and let go of the parts that she wasn’t. It was like revising a story; she was always cutting details to shape the plot.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“A man may be benign or he may be sinister, but don't expect him to be interesting.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“Curious, living in someone else’s house—it was like parachuting into another person’s life, landing smack in the middle of a home with its own culture and mores.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“What came to mind was a line from a Salinger story, something about how every man has at least one place that at some point turns into a girl. She’d written a paper on what that one line meant, and still, she hadn’t understood until she happened upon this surfer on Martha’s Vineyard. Perhaps, for every woman, there is at least one place that at some point turns into a boy.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“At dinner parties with their friends, they would finish each other’s sentences, lavish compliments on each other, emit a magnetism few couples could emulate. And yet, in private, they seemed to cause only pain.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“She didn’t like the way he’d said, cuties in typing, like the woman was something for him to enjoy, rather than a professional doing her job. Fathers shouldn’t talk that way; as Heddy saw it, once a man had a child, particularly a daughter, he should tamp down any vulgar aspects of his personality.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“Heddy devoured books like others did chocolate. It was her way of escaping into another place whenever hers was too much to bear.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“When you grew up with a parent short on rent most months, when a budget taped to the fridge accounted for every penny of your mother’s income, you knew what you were capable of because you had to decide early on if you were going to fight against the tide pushing you downstream or simply let yourself sink. You knew that when your mother collapsed from exhaustion on the subway steps after working nineteen hours straight, that she was the definition of the word “tenacious.” Or when she fell into a funk and cried for hours on the couch, the shades drawn and dinner hardly a thought, then you believed your grandmother when she told you, “Times are hard, but this, too, will pass.” You believed it because you had to. It wasn’t whether you were capable in life that mattered, it was whether you got a chance.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“You see, a lot of people go fishing, and they wait for a fish to bite. But we could sit here all day with these poles and nothing may come of it. The same is true for love.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“The Williams’s home is one hundred times grander than any of our fantasies, and the view from my bedroom window is equally sublime. Sailboats glide along the silvery waves in the morning, the sky a painting of pinks and purples in the evening. Jean-Rose, even the children, take everything about their lives for granted, whereas I appreciate every detail.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“You can’t make assumptions about people. On-screen, I get to control the ending. Real life is so much more disappointing.”
Heddy tugged a shrimp off a skewer. “Maybe that’s why I want to be a writer. Then things can only be as bad as I make them.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“She left home with one identity, but while away, she dared to step into another one. But it left her feeling lost, since she wasn’t firmly planted in the upper-crust circles at school or the working-class neighborhood back home. She was somehow both, teetering between the two worlds, lost in a way no one else she knew was.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“The first few dates were always ripe with possibility. But at what point did cracks emerge in these men who seemed so good on paper?”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“While Jean-Rose is exceedingly friendly and quite likable, she’s also studied. She’s extra aware of what her words and behaviors reveal about her, and she acts as though shaping the family’s public face is of highest priority. Even if she’s friendly, I must remind myself that we are not friends.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“I’ve always thought that different doors are ways into different lives. Like, what would it be like to walk out one door and into another? I like to imagine the characters who would live in a penthouse, a Cape Cod, a sprawling beach house (...) But what goes on inside those houses, the lives of these characters, is all the same—love, betrayal, sadness, and joy.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“An “hourly girl”? The thought cut like a razor, and for the first time, it made her resent these women in updos and strappy sandals. If Heddy ever had money, she’d never make anyone feel like less because they worked in service. Her mother taught her to be thankful for any kindness the world showed her, and the two of them often listed three things they were grateful for over breakfast each morning, no matter how hard times were. She wondered what Jean-Rose was more grateful for—having two beautiful children, or having two servants, even “hourly” ones? Sadly, she guessed the answer was the latter.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“The best part about growing up is that you get to write your own story.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“Jean-Rose is powerful among the women she knows because of her link to Ted, but if Ted is this cruel, and if this has happened before, and she endures this cruelty to hold on to her social standing, then she may be the weakest person I know. It’s incredibly sad, and I judge her for staying, but I also understand. Maybe she’s scared? The cynic in me believes she puts up with it because Ted makes her feel strong on the outside, even if he’s shattering her on the inside.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings

“That she might marry someone her equal, who needed her as much as she needed him, was a different way to think about marriage. Was it even possible that someone else would join her life, that there could ever be a “we” other than her and her mother? She knew there’d be a day when she’d lose her mother, and that she’d be alone then. But imagine having someone else, a backup—a life partner.”
― Brooke Lea Foster, Summer Darlings