Top 380 Paula Hawkins Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “How much better life must have been for jealous drunks before emails and texts and mobile phones, before all this electronica and the traces it leaves.”

— Paula Hawkins

152. “If I sit in carriage D, which I usually do, and the train stops at this signal, which it almost always does, I have a perfect view into my favourite trackside house: number fifteen.”

— Paula Hawkins

153. “I just don’t know whether he’s the condemned man or the executioner.”

— Paula Hawkins

154. “The clouds that menaced this morning did so all day, growing heavier and blacker until they burst, monsoon-like, this evening, just as office workers stepped outside and the rush hour began in earnest, leaving the roads gridlocked and tube station entrances choked with people opening and closing umbrellas.”

— Paula Hawkins

155. “I want to say something to him, but the words keep evaporating, vanishing off my tongue before I have the chance to say them. I can taste them, but I can’t tell if they are sweet or sour.”

— Paula Hawkins

156. “The windows of number fifteen, reflecting morning sunshine, look like sightless eyes.”

— Paula Hawkins

157. “I’ve always thought that it might be fun to be Catholic, to be able to go to the confessional and unburden yourself and have someone tell you that they forgive you, to take all the sin away, wipe the slate clean.”

— Paula Hawkins

158. “I need to find something that I must do, something undeniable.”

— Paula Hawkins

159. “You were never the princess, you were never the passive beauty waiting for a prince, you were something else. You sided with darkness, with the wicked stepmother, the bad fairy, the witch.”

— Paula Hawkins

160. “No matter how much I love him, it won’t be enough.”

— Paula Hawkins

161. “Only I’m not sure that I am doing it just for him, and I don’t really have a plan.”

— Paula Hawkins

162. “She has her fingers curled tightly around his forefinger and I have hold of her perfect pink foot, and I feel as though fireworks are going off in my chest. It’s impossible, this much love.”

— Paula Hawkins

163. “If I can just learn how to hold on to this feeling, this one I’m having now – if I could just discover how to focus on this happiness, enjoy the moment, not wonder about where the next high is coming from – then everything will be all right.”

— Paula Hawkins

164. “Life and light will not let me be.”

— Paula Hawkins

165. “I was right, I knew I was, but it won’t do me any good to say it. I enjoy my victory silently; I take pleasure in it almost as much as in his touch.”

— Paula Hawkins

166. “I can’t help the way I am. “You can help what you do, though.” That’s what Kamal says.”

— Paula Hawkins

167. “I’d never realized, not until the last year or two of my life, how shaming it is to be pitied.”

— Paula Hawkins

168. “The places where hopeless people go to end it all, cathedrals of despair.”

— Paula Hawkins

169. “I’m well aware that there is no job more important than that of raising a child, but the problem is that it isn’t valued.”

— Paula Hawkins

170. “I quit! I feel so much better, as if anything is possible. I’m free!”

— Paula Hawkins

171. “I’m squinting into hazy morning sunshine.”

— Paula Hawkins

172. “I’m good enough to make him believe that it’s all about him.”

— Paula Hawkins

173. “I found out the way everyone seems to find out these days: an electronic slip. Sometimes it’s a text or a voice mail message; in my case it was an email, the modern-day lipstick on the collar.”

— Paula Hawkins

174. “It actually wasn’t about her child at all, although the fact that the child never stops whinging did make her hard to love.”

— Paula Hawkins

175. “You take care of yourself, Rachel,” she said, and there was something about the way she said it that made it feel like a warning. We are tied together, forever bound by the stories we told.”

— Paula Hawkins

176. “It could be her birthday, it could be the morning of the Rapture – Cathy will get up early on Saturday to clean.”

— Paula Hawkins

177. “It’s just after seven, it’s chilly out here now, but it’s so beautiful like this, all these strips of garden side by side, green and cold and waiting for fingers of sunshine to creep up from the tracks and make them all come alive. I’ve been up for hours; I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept.”

— Paula Hawkins

178. “Accidents do happen, and they especially happen to drunks, but mother and son, eight weeks apart? In fiction, that would never stand.”

— Paula Hawkins

179. “Watching someone in the throes of raw grief is a terrible thing; the act of watching feels violent, intrusive, a violation. Yet we do it, we have to do it, all the time; you just have to learn to cope with it whatever way you can.”

— Paula Hawkins

180. “Hollowness: that I understand. I’m starting to think that there isn’t anything you can do to fix it... The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps. All these things I know, but I don’t say them out loud, not now.”

— Paula Hawkins

181. “The pain is solid and heavy, it sits in the middle of my chest.”

— Paula Hawkins

182. “At night I can hear it, quiet but unrelenting, undeniable: a whisper in my head, Slip away. When I close my eyes, my head is filled with images of past and future lives, the things I had and threw away. I can’t get comfortable, because every way I turn I run into dead ends.”

— Paula Hawkins

183. “But my better angels lost again, defeated by drink, by the person I am when I drink. 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

184. “Perhaps this is just more self-deception, yet another attempt to prove to myself that I’m not worthless. But perhaps it’s real.”

— Paula Hawkins

185. “I need to bring myself out of this stupor, I can’t afford to be weak. I can’t rely on anyone else. I know that.”

— Paula Hawkins

186. “Now look what you made me do.”

— Paula Hawkins

187. “I’m sorry,” I say, and I mean it, because although I’m shocked to hear the words, to imagine that he could speak to her like that, I know what it is to love someone and to say the most terrible things to them, in anger or anguish.”

— Paula Hawkins

188. “I read somewhere that a train can rip the clothes right off you when it hits.”

— Paula Hawkins

189. “I close my eyes and let the darkness grow and spread until it morphs from a feeling of sadness into something worse: a memory, a flashback. I didn’t just ask him to call me back. I remember now, I was crying. I told him that I still loved him, that I always would. Please, Tom, please, I need to talk to you. I miss you. No no no no no no no.”

— Paula Hawkins

190. “I was a mistress of self-reinvention.”

— Paula Hawkins

191. “Irene had read in a newspaper article that the happiest people on earth were unmarried childless women. She could see why-there was a lot to be said for that sort of freedom, for not being answerable to anyone, for living exactly how you pleased. Only, once you’d fallen in love you could never be truly free, could you? It was too late by then.”

— Paula Hawkins

192. “I close my eyes and let the darkness grow and spread until it morphs from a feeling of sadness into something worse: a memory, a flashback.”

— Paula Hawkins

193. “Everything is material. And comedy equals tragedy plus time. Isn’t that how it goes?”

— Paula Hawkins

194. “I don’t have words to describe what I felt that day, but now, sitting on the train, I am furious, nails digging into my palms, tears stinging my eyes. I feel a flash of intense anger. I feel as though something has been taken away from me.”

— Paula Hawkins

195. “I only feel like myself when I’m running.”

— Paula Hawkins

196. “I’m not just going to be ignored.”

— Paula Hawkins

197. “One piece of the memory led to the next. It’s as though I’d been blundering about in the dark for days, weeks, months, then finally caught hold of something. Like running my hand along a wall to find my way from one room to the next. Shifting shadows started at last to coalesce, and after a while my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, and I could see.”

— Paula Hawkins

198. “Maybe if I’d done all that, I wouldn’t have ended up here, not knowing what to do next. Or maybe, if I’d done all that, I’d have ended up exactly where I am and I would be perfectly contented.”

— Paula Hawkins

199. “I remember an argument, right at the end, when things were about as bad as they could be; he lost his temper with me. “What happened to you, Rachel?” he asked me. “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

200. “It’s nice being out early, before the school run, before the commute gets going; the streets are empty and clean, the day full of possibility.”

— Paula Hawkins