Top 380 Paula Hawkins Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

154. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

156. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

162. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

164. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

167. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

176. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

178. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “Now look what you made me do.”

— Paula Hawkins

185. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

190. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

198. “I feel a sadness unlike anything I’ve ever felt before crashing over me like a wave, crushing the breath right out of me.”

— Paula Hawkins

199. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins