Top 380 Paula Hawkins Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “They’re what I lost, they’re everything I want to be.”

— Paula Hawkins

52. “I feel a real sense of disappointment, I feel as though I have been cheated on. A familiar ache fills my chest. I have felt this way before. On a larger scale, to a more intense degree, of course, but I remember the quality of the pain. You don’t forget it.”

— Paula Hawkins

53. “On the train, the tears come, and I don’t care if people are watching me; for all they know, my dog might have been run over. I might have been diagnosed with a terminal illness. I might be a barren, divorced, soon-to-be-homeless alcoholic.”

— Paula Hawkins

54. “Being the other woman is a huge turn-on, there’s no point denying it: you’re the one he can’t help but betray his wife for, even though he loves her. That’s just how irresistible you are.”

— Paula Hawkins

55. “Life is not a paragraph, and death is no parenthesis.”

— Paula Hawkins

56. “I miss being a mistress. I enjoyed it. I loved it, in fact. I never felt guilty. I pretended I did. I had to, with my married girlfriends, the ones who live in terror of the pert au pair or the pretty, funny girl in the office who can talk about football and spends half her life in the gym. I had to tell them that of course I felt terrible about it, of course I felt bad for his wife, I never meant for any of this to happen, we fell in love, what could we do?”

— Paula Hawkins

57. “She’s buried beneath a silver birch tree, down towards the old train tracks, her grave marked with a cairn. Not more than a little pile of stones, really. I didn’t want to draw attention to her resting place, but I couldn’t leave her without remembrance. She’ll sleep peacefully there, no one to disturb her, no sounds but birdsong and the rumble of passing trains.”

— Paula Hawkins

58. “Beautiful sunshine, cloudless skies, no one to play with, nothing to do. Living like this, the way I’m living at the moment, is harder in the summer when there is so much daylight, so little cover of darkness, when everyone is out and about, being flagrantly, aggressively happy. It’s exhausting, and it makes you feel bad if you’re not joining in.”

— Paula Hawkins

59. “This is what marriage is – safe, warm, comfortable. Tom.”

— Paula Hawkins

60. “And I’ve just got to let myself feel the pain, because if I don’t, if I keep numbing it, it’ll never really go away.”

— Paula Hawkins

61. “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 mold yourself through the gaps.”

— Paula Hawkins

62. “I’m a good liar,” he told me once with a grin. Once, he said, “Even if she did check, the thing with Rachel is, she won’t remember what happened tomorrow anyway.” That’s when I started to realize just how bad things were for him. It.”

— Paula Hawkins

63. “There’s nothing so painful, so corrosive, as suspicion.”

— Paula Hawkins

64. “The last thing I need is rest.”

— Paula Hawkins

65. “Sometimes I want to scream at him, Just let me go. Let me go. Let me breathe. So I can’t sleep, and I’m angry. I feel as though we’re having fight already, even though the fight’s only in my imagination. And in my head, thoughts go round and round and round. And I feel like I’m suffocating.”

— Paula Hawkins

66. “The horrors conjured up by the mind are always so much worse than what is.”

— Paula Hawkins

67. “I can’t do this, I can’t just be a wife. I don’t understand how anyone does it – there is literally nothing to do but wait. Wait for a man to come home and love you. Either that or look around for something to distract you.”

— Paula Hawkins

68. “Well, I can, I do, I want to, I don’t want to, I try not to. Every day I tell myself not to look, and every day I look. I can’t help myself, even though there is nothing I want to see there, even though anything I do see will hurt me.”

— Paula Hawkins

69. “I’m not even that upset about the rejection any more. What bothers me most is that I haven’t got to the end of my story, and I can’t start over with someone else, it’s too hard.”

— Paula Hawkins

70. “What if the thing I’m looking for can never be found? What if it just isn’t possible?”

— Paula Hawkins

71. “I’ve been up for hours; I can’t sleep. I hate insomnia more than anything, just lying there, brain going round, tick, tick, tick. I itch all over. I want to shave my head.”

— Paula Hawkins

72. “Sometimes I don’t even watch the trains go past, I just listen. Sitting here in the morning, eyes closed and the hot sun orange on my eyelids, I could be anywhere. I could be in the south of Spain, at the beach; I could be in Italy, the Cinque Terre, all those pretty coloured houses and the trains ferrying the tourists back and forth. I could be back in Holkham with the screech of gulls in my ears and salt on my tongue and a ghost train passing on the rusted track half a mile away.”

— Paula Hawkins

73. “I want to drag knives over my skin, just to feel something other than shame, but I’m not even brave enough for that.”

— Paula Hawkins

74. “Sometimes I catch myself trying to remember the last time I had meaningful physical contact with another person, just a hug or a heartfelt squeeze of my hand, and my heart twitches.”

— Paula Hawkins

75. “I am not a model wife. I can’t be. No matter how much I love him, it won’t be enough.”

— Paula Hawkins

76. “I miss being a mistress.”

— Paula Hawkins

77. “It doesn’t feel like it was me who was doing that thing. And it’s so hard to feel responsible for something you don’t remember. So I never feel bad enough. I feel bad, but the thing that I’ve done – it’s removed from me. It’s like it doesn’t belong to me.”

— Paula Hawkins

78. “A familiar ache fills my chest. I have felt this way before. On a larger scale, to a more intense degree, of course, but I remember the quality of the pain. You don’t forget it.”

— Paula Hawkins

79. “I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept in days. I hate this, hate insomnia more than anything, just lying there, brain going round, tick, tick, tick, tick. I itch all over. I want to shave my head.”

— Paula Hawkins

80. “There can be no greater agony, nothing can be more painful than the not knowing, which will never end.”

— Paula Hawkins

81. “I thought how odd it was that parents believe they know their children, understand their children. Do they not remember what it was like to be eighteen, or fifteen, or twelve? Perhaps having children makes you forget being one.”

— Paula Hawkins

82. “The river can go back over the past and bring it all up and spit it out on the banks in full view of everyone, but people can’t.”

— Paula Hawkins

83. “Nothing at all would be a step up from my conversations with Anna. God, she’s dull! You get the feeling that she probably had something to say for herself once upon a time, but now everything is about the child: Is she warm enough? Is she too warm? How much milk did she take?”

— Paula Hawkins

84. “I know is, one minute I’m ticking along fine and life is sweet and I want for nothing, and the next I can’t wait to get away, I’m all over the place, slipping and sliding again.”

— Paula Hawkins

85. “He never understood that it’s possible to miss what you’ve never had, to mourn for it.”

— Paula Hawkins

86. “The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.”

— Paula Hawkins

87. “Cathy gets up early to clean the house every Saturday, no matter what. It could be her birthday, it could be the morning of the Rapture – Cathy will get up early on Saturday to clean. She says it’s cathartic, it sets her up for a good weekend, and because she cleans the house aerobically, it means she doesn’t have to go to the gym.”

— Paula Hawkins

88. “Usually, I would pretend to be nice, but this morning I feel real, like myself. I feel high, almost like I’m tripping, and I couldn’t fake nice if I tried.”

— Paula Hawkins

89. “You’re not some grieving, lost child any longer. You’re a completely different person. You’re stronger. You’re an adult now. You don’t have to be afraid of being alone. It’s not the worst thing, is it?”

— Paula Hawkins

90. “Some say the women left something of themselves in the water; some say it retains some of their power, for ever since then it has drawn to its shores the unlucky, the desperate, the unhappy, the lost. They come here to swim with their sisters.”

— Paula Hawkins

91. “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, knowing how it feels to be broken.”

— Paula Hawkins

92. “It’s not even rejection, it’s dismissal.”

— Paula Hawkins

93. “She had never realized before her life was torn apart how awkward grief was, how inconvenient for everyone with whom the mourner came into contact. At first it was acknowledged and respected and deferred to. But after a while it got in the way – of conversation, of laughter, of normal life.”

— Paula Hawkins

94. “I sit there on the floor with the picture in front of me and think about how things get broken all the time by accident, and how sometimes you just don’t get round to getting them fixed.”

— Paula Hawkins

95. “It is, will always be, a black hole in my timeline.”

— Paula Hawkins

96. “They’re a match, they’re a set. They’re happy, I can tell. They’re what I used to be, they’re Tom and me five years ago. They’re what I lost, they’re everything I want to be.”

— Paula Hawkins

97. “I wake abruptly, my breath jagged and heart racing, my mouth stale, and I know immediately that’s it. I’m awake. The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.”

— Paula Hawkins

98. “Every time I hear footsteps on the steps, my heart rate goes up. Every time I hear the clacking of high heels, I am seized with trepidation.”

— Paula Hawkins

99. “He lies to himself the way he lies to me. He believes this. He actually believes that he was good to me.”

— Paula Hawkins

100. “I don’t have a husband. And she betrayed hers. I think of the things her real friends said about her: wonderful, funny, beautiful, warmhearted. Loved. She made a mistake. It happens. We are none of us perfect.”

— Paula Hawkins