Top 380 Paula Hawkins Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “She used to think that only parents can understand the sort of love that swallows you up, but now she wondered whether it was only mothers who did.”

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

103. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

106. “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

107. “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

108. “That’s my fault, of course, because I behaved stupidly, like a child, because I didn’t like feeling rejected. I need to learn to lose a little better.”

— Paula Hawkins

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “The train stops. We are almost opposite Jess and Jason’s house, but I can’t see across the carriage and the tracks, there are too many people in the way. I wonder whether they are there, whether he knows, whether he’s left, or whether he’s still living a life he’s yet to discover is a lie.”

— Paula Hawkins

113. “Why would she do that? Jason loves her, I can see it, they’re happy. I can’t believe she would do that to him, he doesn’t deserve that. I feel a real sense of disappointment, I feel as though I have been cheated. 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

114. “Sometimes I feel like seeing if I can track down anybody from the old days, but then I think, what would I talk to them about now?”

— Paula Hawkins

115. “I can’t speak, can’t move. The living room is hot, airless despite the open windows. I can hear noises from the street below: a police siren, young girls shouting and laughing, bass booming from a passing car. Normal life. But in here, the world is ending. For Scott, the world is ending, and I can’t speak. I stand there, mute, helpless, useless.”

— Paula Hawkins

116. “And they are a partnership. I can see it, I know how they are. His strength, that protectiveness he radiates, it doesn’t mean she’s weak. She’s strong in other ways; she makes intellectual leaps that leave him openmouthed in admiration. She can cut to the nub of a problem, dissect and analyse it in the time it takes other people to say good morning. At parties, he often holds her hand, even though they’ve been together years. They respect each other, they don’t put each other down.”

— Paula Hawkins

117. “It’s impossible to resist the kindness of strangers.”

— Paula Hawkins

118. “Lena’s voice grew cold. “I don’t understand you. I don’t understand people like you, who always choose to blame the woman. If there’s two people doing something wrong and one of them’s a girl, it’s got to be her fault, right?”

— Paula Hawkins

119. “She’s cuckoo, laying her egg in my nest.”

— Paula Hawkins

120. “Chaque jour, je me dis de ne pas regarder et, chaque jour, je regarde.”

— Paula Hawkins

121. “After all he gave up for me, for the two of us to be together, I let him think that he wasn’t enough.”

— Paula Hawkins

122. “He doesn’t know how determined I can be. Once I’ve made my mind up, I’m a force to be reckoned with.”

— Paula Hawkins

123. “One more day of drinking, perhaps, and then I’ll get myself straight tomorrow.”

— Paula Hawkins

124. “You can’t step directly into a cold stream of water, it’s too shocking, too brutal, but if you get there gradually, you hardly notice it; it’s like boiling a frog in reverse.”

— Paula Hawkins

125. “And now I find myself behaving exactly like she used to: polishing off the half bottle of red left over from dinner last night and snooping around on his computer. It’s easier to understand her behaviour when you feel like I feel right now. There’s nothing so painful, so corrosive, as suspicion.”

— Paula Hawkins

126. “And unless you mean it, you said, why do it? Don’t be a tourist. No one likes a tourist.”

— Paula Hawkins

127. “When I close my eyes, my head is filled with images of past and future lives, the things I dreamed I wanted, the things I had and threw away.”

— Paula Hawkins

128. “To have my hopes raised and dashed again, it’s like cold steel twisting in my gut.”

— Paula Hawkins

129. “I miss him every day. More than anyone, I think. He’s the big hole in my life, in the middle of my soul. Or maybe he was just the beginning of it. I don’t know. I don’t even know whether all this is really about Ben, or whether it’s about everything that happened after that, and everything that’s happened since. All 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

130. “I am interested, for the first time in ages, in something other than my own misery. I have purpose. Or at least, I have a distraction.”

— Paula Hawkins

131. “He finishes his beer and rolls the empty bottle across the table. With a sad shake of his head, he gets to his feet, comes over to me and holds out his hands. “Come on,” he says. “Grab hold. Come on, Rach, up you.”

— Paula Hawkins

132. “They wouldn’t even recognize Megan the happily married suburbanite. In any case, I can’t risk looking backwards, it’s always a bad idea. I’ll wait until the summer is over, then I’ll look for work. It seems like a shame to waste these long summer days. I’ll find something, here or elsewhere, I know I will.”

— Paula Hawkins

133. “He’ll be so happy. He’ll be mental with joy when I tell him. The thought that she might not be his won’t even cross his mind. Telling him would be cruel, it would break his heart, and I don’t want to hurt him. I’ve never wanted to hurt him. I can’t help the way I am.”

— Paula Hawkins

134. “I’ve been the fool. If he does it with you, he’ll do it to you.”

— Paula Hawkins

135. “It broke me and I broke us.”

— Paula Hawkins

136. “The thing about being barren is that you’re not allowed to get away from it.”

— Paula Hawkins

137. “He loves me so much, it makes me ache. I don’t know how he does it. I would drive me mad.”

— Paula Hawkins

138. “She exists purely in the moment.”

— Paula Hawkins

139. “She felt it when she woke, not a presence but an absence.”

— Paula Hawkins

140. “They never saw what the water really was, greenish-black and filled with living things and dying things.”

— Paula Hawkins

141. “She must be very secure in herself, I suppose, in them, for it not to bother her, to walk where another woman has walked before. She obviously doesn’t think of me as a threat. I think about Ted Hughes, moving Assia Wevill into the home he’d shared with Plath, of her wearing Sylvia’s clothes, brushing her hair with the same brush. I want to ring Anna up and remind her that Assia ended up with her head in the oven, just like Sylvia did.”

— Paula Hawkins

142. “I might never have the courage to say the words out loud, I might lose them altogether, they might stick in my throat and choke me in my sleep.”

— Paula Hawkins

143. “There was a time when I thought he could be everything, he could be enough. I thought that for years. I loved him completely. I still do. But I don’t want this any longer.”

— Paula Hawkins

144. “You stung me like that often; cruelty always was your strong suit.”

— Paula Hawkins

145. “Cathy’s a nice person, in a forceful sort of way. She makes you notice her niceness. Her niceness is writ large, it is her defining quality and she needs it acknowledged, often, daily almost, which can be tiring.”

— Paula Hawkins

146. “But then I suppose I’ve never really lost anyone. How would I know what that kind of grief feels like?”

— Paula Hawkins

147. “He follows me and I take off my clothes as I’m going up the stairs, and when we get there, when he pushes me down on the bed, I’m not even thinking about him, but it doesn’t matter because he doesn’t know that. I’m good enough to make him believe that it’s all about him.”

— Paula Hawkins

148. “I feel a rush of gratitude so strong, it feels almost like love.”

— Paula Hawkins

149. “I can’t blame this all for my drinking – I can’t blame my parents or my childhood, and abusive uncle or some terrible tragedy. It’s my fault. I was a drinker anyway – I’ve always liked to drink. But I did become sadder, and sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for everyone around them. And then I went from being a drinker to being a drunk, and there’s nothing more boring than that.”

— Paula Hawkins

150. “I’m starting to see what he must have seen in her. What he must have loved.”

— Paula Hawkins