Top 380 Paula Hawkins Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It isn’t normal to invade someone’s privacy to that degree. It’s what is often seen as a form of emotional abuse.”

— Paula Hawkins

2. “Once I’ve made my mind up, I’m a force to be reckoned with.”

— Paula Hawkins

3. “When did you become so weak?” I don’t know. I don’t know where that strength went, I don’t remember losing it. I think that over time it got chipped away, bit by bit, by life, by the living of it.”

— Paula Hawkins

4. “The things I want to remember I can’t, and the things I try so hard to forget just keep coming.”

— Paula Hawkins

5. “I am not the girl I used to be. I am no longer desirable, I’m off-putting in some way. It’s not just that I’ve put on weight, or that my face is puffy from the drinking and the lack of sleep; it’s as if people can see the damage written all over me, can see it in my face, the way I hold myself, the way I move.”

— Paula Hawkins

6. “Beware a calm surface – you never know what lies beneath.”

— Paula Hawkins

7. “I felt isolated in my misery. I became lonely, so I drank a bit, and then a bit more, and then I became lonelier, because no one likes being around a drunk. I lost and I drank and I drank and I lost.”

— Paula Hawkins

8. “So who do I want to be tomorrow?”

— Paula Hawkins

9. “I’m not normal.”

— Paula Hawkins

10. “Anything was possible. When you hear hooves you look for horses, but you can’t discount zebras.”

— Paula Hawkins

11. “Sometimes, I don’t want to go anywhere, I think I’ll be happy if I never have to set foot outside the house again.”

— Paula Hawkins

12. “I know that I’m going to be better, that I’m going to be happy. It won’t be long.”

— Paula Hawkins

13. “I felt guilty. Stupid, I know, but I thought about Scott – about what we did and how it felt – and I wished I hadn’t done it, because it felt like a betrayal. Of Tom. The man who left me for another woman two years ago. I can’t help how I feel.”

— Paula Hawkins

14. “On the way back down the road, he passes me in his car, our eyes meet for just a second and he smiles at me.”

— Paula Hawkins

15. “Why am I doing this? What purpose does it serve?”

— Paula Hawkins

16. “The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps.”

— Paula Hawkins

17. “I had a teacher at school who told me once that I was a mistress of self-reinvention. I didn’t know what he was on about at the time, I thought he was putting me on, but I’ve since come to like the idea. Runaway, lover, wife, waitress, gallery manager, nanny, and a few more in between. So who do I want to be tomorrow?”

— Paula Hawkins

18. “Let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things – their looks and their role as mothers. I’m not beautiful, and I can’t have kids, so what does that make me? Worthless.”

— Paula Hawkins

19. “We tell our stories differently, don’t we, you and I?”

— Paula Hawkins

20. “He’s a master at it, making me feel as though everything is my fault, making me feel worthless.”

— Paula Hawkins

21. “I am no longer just a girl on the train, going back and forth without point or purpose.”

— Paula Hawkins

22. “In no time at all, I find myself crying again. It’s impossible to resist the kindness of strangers. Someone who looks at you, who doesn’t know you, who tells you it’s OK, whatever you did, whatever you’ve done: you suffered, you hurt, you deserve forgiveness. I confide in him and I forget, once again, what I’m doing here. I don’t watch his face for a reaction, I don’t study his eyes for some sign of guilt or suspicion. I let him comfort me.”

— Paula Hawkins

23. “I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head.”

— Paula Hawkins

24. “Who’s to say that once I run, I’ll find that isn’t enough? Who’s to say I won’t end up feeling exactly the way I do right now-not safe, but stifled? Maybe I’ll want to run again, and again, and eventually I’ll end up back on those old tracks, because there’s nowhere left to go. Maybe. Maybe not. You have to take the risk, don’t you.”

— Paula Hawkins

25. “It’s ridiculous, when I think about it. How did I find myself here? I wonder where it started, my decline; I wonder at what point I could have halted it. Where did I take the wrong turn?”

— Paula Hawkins

26. “There are people who are drawn to water, who retain some vestigial primal sense of where it flows. I believe that I am one of them. I am most alive when I am near the water, when I am near this water. This is the place where I learned to swim, the place where I learned to inhabit nature and my body in the most joyous and pleasurable way.”

— Paula Hawkins

27. “It feels like coming home – not just to any home, but a childhood home, a place left behind a lifetime ago; it’s the familiarity of walking up stairs and knowing exactly which one is going to creak.”

— Paula Hawkins

28. “There’s something comforting about the sight of strangers safe at home.”

— Paula Hawkins

29. “A tiding of magpies: One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told.”

— Paula Hawkins

30. “I’m playing at real life instead of actually living it.”

— Paula Hawkins

31. “After everything he’s been through he deserves to be happy, I will never begrude him happiness, I only wish it could be with me.”

— Paula Hawkins

32. “But I did become sadder, and sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for everyone around them.”

— Paula Hawkins

33. “Drunk Rachel sees no consequences, she is either excessively expansive and optimistic or wrapped up in hate. She has no past, no future. She exists purely in the moment.”

— Paula Hawkins

34. “I don’t believe in soul mates, but there’s an understanding between us that I just haven’t felt before, or at least, not for a long time. It comes from shared experience, from knowing how it feels to be broken. Hollowness: that I understand. I’m starting to believe that there isn’t anything you can do to fix it. That’s what I’ve taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps.”

— Paula Hawkins

35. “If he thinks I’m going to sit around crying over him, he’s got another thing coming. I can live without him, I can do without him just fine – but I don’t like to lose. It’s not like me. None of this is like me. I don’t get rejected. I’m the one who walks away.”

— Paula Hawkins

36. “Nobody warned me it would break us. But it did. Or rather, it broke me, and then I broke us.”

— Paula Hawkins

37. “I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts.”

— Paula Hawkins

38. “I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts. Who was it said that following your heart is a good thing? It is pure egotism, a selfishness to conquer all.”

— Paula Hawkins

39. “But then I think, this happens sometimes, doesn’t it? People you have a history with, they won’t let you go, and as hard as you might try, you can’t disentangle yourself, can’t set yourself free. Maybe after a while you just stop trying.”

— Paula Hawkins

40. “You’re like one of those dogs, the unwanted ones that have been mistreated all their lives. You can kick them and kick them, but they’ll still come back to you, cringing and wagging their tails. Begging. Hoping that this time it’ll be different, that this time they’ll do something right and you’ll love them.”

— Paula Hawkins

41. “Imagine walking past the place where you lost someone, every single day.”

— Paula Hawkins

42. “Beckford is not a suicide spot. Beckford is a place to get rid of troublesome women.”

— Paula Hawkins

43. “It’s impossible to resist the kindness of strangers. Someone who looks at you, who doesn’t know you, who tells you it’s OK, whatever you did, whatever you’ve done: you suffered, you hurt, you deserve forgiveness.”

— Paula Hawkins

44. “All this guilt, this doubt, it was corrosive. It was changing her, twisting her. She was not the woman she used to be. She could feel herself slipping, slithering as though she were shedding a skin, and she didn’t like the rawness underneath, she didn’t like the smell of it. It made her feel vulnerable, it made her feel afraid.”

— Paula Hawkins

45. “In between them stood an elephant and she felt she ought to point it out.”

— Paula Hawkins

46. “I stop at the corner and peer into the underpass. That smell of cold and damp always sends a little shiver down my spine, it’s like turning over a rock to see what’s underneath: moss and worms and earth. It reminds me of playing in the garden as a child, looking for frogs by the pond with Ben. I walk on. The street is clear – no sign of Tom or Anna – and the part of me that can’t resist a bit of drama is actually quite disappointed.”

— Paula Hawkins

47. “The memory doesn’t fit with the reality, because I don’t remember anger, raging fury. I remember fear.”

— Paula Hawkins

48. “Who was it said that following your heart is a good thing? It is pure egotism, a selfishness to conquer all.”

— Paula Hawkins

49. “Maybe the courage I need has nothing to do with telling the truth and everything to do with walking away.”

— Paula Hawkins

50. “No one liked to think about the fact that the water in that river was infected with the blood and bile of persecuted women, unhappy women; they drank it every day.”

— Paula Hawkins