Top 380 Paula Hawkins Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “I need to find something that I must do, something undeniable.”

— Paula Hawkins

152. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

155. “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

156. “Some things you should let go of Others you shouldn’t Views differ as to which – Emily Berry, “The Numbers Game.”

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

— Paula Hawkins

159. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

163. “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

164. “That we were all so happy. It seems unimaginable. All that happiness, wrecked.”

— Paula Hawkins

165. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

171. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

175. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

177. “But I feel exhausted, these past few weeks have been so hard on me.”

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

182. “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

183. “If he does it with you, he’ll do it to you.”

— Paula Hawkins

184. “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

185. “Beautiful sunshine, cloudless skies, no one to play with, nothing to do.”

— Paula Hawkins

186. “It’s not that unusual, death by train. Two to three hundred a year, they say, so at least one every couple of days. I’m not sure how many of those are accidental.”

— Paula Hawkins

187. “The train stops at the signal as usual. I can see Jess standing on the patio in front of the French doors. She’s wearing a bright print dress, her feet are bare.”

— Paula Hawkins

188. “I’m on the train, looking out at a pile of clothes on the side of the tracks. Dark-blue cloth. A dress, I think, with a black belt. I can’t imagine how it ended up down there. That certainly wasn’t left behind by the engineers. We’re moving, glacially though, so I have plenty of time to look, and it seems to me that I’ve seen that dress before, I’ve seen someone wearing it. I can’t remember when. It’s very cold. Too cold for a dress like that. I think it might snow soon.”

— Paula Hawkins

189. “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

190. “Now look what you made me do.”

— Paula Hawkins

191. “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

192. “But I know something happened on Saturday. I knew it when I looked into that dark tunnel under the railway line, my blood turning to ice water in my veins. Blackouts happen, and it isn’t just a matter of being a bit hazy about getting home from the club or forgetting what it was that was so funny when you were chatting in the pub. It’s different. Total black; hours lost, never to be retrieved.”

— Paula Hawkins

193. “My face is hot, there is cold sweat under my armpits and at the base of my spine.”

— Paula Hawkins

194. “Yesterday – sensible, clear-headed, right-thinking – I decided I must accept that my part in this story was over. 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.”

— Paula Hawkins

195. “I just can’t see us happy and relaxed like that. Not now. Not after what I’ve just done. I was so convinced this morning that getting everything out in the open would be the best way – not just the best way, the only way. No more lying. No more hiding.”

— Paula Hawkins

196. “I watch him come, I watch him, and I don’t move until he’s almost upon me, and then I swing. I jam the vicious twist of the corkscrew into his neck.”

— Paula Hawkins

197. “I sit up, eyes wide, and see something moving in the corner of the room, a dense centre of blackness that keeps growing, and I almost cry out – and then I’m properly awake and there’s nothing there, but I am sitting up in bed and my cheeks are wet with tears.”

— Paula Hawkins

198. “I can’t remember what I was watching, but at some point I must have felt lonely, or happy, or something, because I wanted to talk to someone.”

— Paula Hawkins

199. “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? 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.”

— Paula Hawkins

200. “In Ashbury I am not a homeowner, not even a tenant – I’m a lodger, occupant of the small second bedroom in Cathy’s bland and inoffensive duplex, subject to her grace and favour.”

— Paula Hawkins