Top 380 Paula Hawkins Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “I just wanted to say thank you, anyway. For coming forward. It was actually... it sounds odd, but it was good to talk to someone... someone I’m not close to. I felt as though I could think more rationally.”

— Paula Hawkins

252. “It was when I was washing my face afterwards, when I saw how tired I looked, how blotchy and bedraggled and bloody awful, that I felt it again – that need to put on a dress and high heels, to blow-dry my hair and put on some makeup and walk down the street and have men turn and look at me.”

— Paula Hawkins

253. “I feel about an incident is proportionate not just to the gravity of the situation, but also to the number of people who have witnessed it.”

— Paula Hawkins

254. “When I look at Tom, I thank God that he found me, too, that I was there to rescue him from that woman. She’d have driven him mad in the end, I really think that – she’d have ground him down, she’d have made him into something he’s not.”

— Paula Hawkins

255. “I feel breathless and afraid. I can’t explain it. I can’t remember what happened, but I can feel it, the fear and confusion.”

— Paula Hawkins

256. “If you want someone badly enough, you’ll do anything to have them.”

— Paula Hawkins

257. “The truth is, I never felt bad for Rachel, even before I found out about her drinking and how difficult she was, how she was making his life a misery. She just wasn’t real to me, and anyway, I was enjoying myself too much. 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

258. “That seemed a stupid reason, but adult stories were full of stupid cruelties:.”

— Paula Hawkins

259. “Was it then that Tom started to look at me differently, his disappointment mirroring my own? 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

260. “It’s transference, Megan,” he said. “It happens from time to time. It happens to me, too. I really should have introduced this topic last time. I’m sorry.” I.”

— Paula Hawkins

261. “Parents don’t care about anything but their children. They are the centre of the universe; they are all that really counts.”

— Paula Hawkins

262. “I should have been prepared for it, should have expected it, but somehow I didn’t.”

— Paula Hawkins

263. “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. It’s ridiculous, when I think about it. How did I find myself here? I wonder where it started, my decline; I wonder at what point I could have halted it. Where did I take the wrong turn?”

— Paula Hawkins

264. “Do you regret it?”

— Paula Hawkins

265. “It’s an odd thing to say, but I think this all the time. I don’t feel bad enough. I know what I’m responsible for, I know all the terrible things I’ve done, even if I don’t remember the details – but I feel distanced from those actions. I feel them at one remove.”

— Paula Hawkins

266. “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.”

— Paula Hawkins

267. “Martin put his hand on my forearm and said, “It’s great to see you, Rachel.” His pity was almost palpable. I’d never realized, not until the last year or two of my life, how shaming it is to be pitied.”

— Paula Hawkins

268. “I wanted to rest my head on the headrest of the chair, close my eyes, breathe in the scent of the pine trees and listen to the birds. I wanted to hold your hand and stay like that all day.”

— Paula Hawkins

269. “I think it’s a process. It’s not simple, you know? I don’t know if there will be a time when I can say that it’s worked. That I’m better.”

— Paula Hawkins

270. “Writing an important email to a colleague at the office in New York, or a carefully worded break-up message to his girlfriend.”

— Paula Hawkins

271. “The police think I’m a rubbernecker. They think I’m a stalker, a nut-case, mentally unstable.”

— Paula Hawkins

272. “I can’t explain why, I know it makes no sense, but if you can’t remember what you’ve done, your mind just fills in all the blanks and you think the worst possible things.”

— Paula Hawkins

273. “Blood starts to ooze from the wound. The girls on the other side of the carriage are watching me, their faces blank.”

— Paula Hawkins

274. “When they’re born,” she said, her hand resting on the door handle, “you hold them, and you imagine a glorious, golden future. Not money or success or fame or anything like that, but happiness. Such happiness! You’d see the world burn if only it meant they would be happy.”

— Paula Hawkins

275. “The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be. I lie there, listening to the sound of Cathy’s urgent, cheerful busyness, and I think about the clothes on the side of the railway line and about Jess kissing her lover in the morning sunshine.”

— Paula Hawkins

276. “I wring the cloth out over the sink and run cold water over my hands.”

— Paula Hawkins

277. “Miriam had lost the talent for friendship when she was young, and once gone, it was a difficult thing to recover. Like loneliness, the absence of friendship was self-perpetuating: the harder you tried to make people like you, the less likely they were to do so; most people recognized right away that something was off, and they shied away.”

— Paula Hawkins

278. “At night when I lie awake 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 dreamed I wanted, the things I had and threw away.”

— Paula Hawkins

279. “Look at the life they have, look at how beautiful it is! I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts.”

— Paula Hawkins

280. “Surely she would call me, wouldn’t she? She would know how panicked... how desperate I would be. She’s not vindictive like that, is she?”

— Paula Hawkins

281. “I can smell her skin. I can feel how cold she was at the end. I can’t get rid of her. I don’t want to. I want to love her.”

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

283. “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

284. “I can’t reply because my mind has gone somewhere else entirely, and it’s not.”

— Paula Hawkins

285. “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

286. “There’s something covering my face, I can’t breathe, I’m suffocating. When I surface into wakefulness, I’m gasping for air and my chest hurts. 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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “Like the police, he’d probably just think I’m a nutter, some weirdo who’s read about the case in the newspaper.”

— Paula Hawkins

292. “I can’t help the way I am. “You can help what you do, though.”

— Paula Hawkins

293. “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

294. “The darkness gets bigger; it’s pushing at the edges of my skull, clouding my vision. I grab Evie by the hand and start to drag her inside. She protests vociferously.”

— Paula Hawkins

295. “I don’t mind, because it reassures him that there’s nothing going on, that I’m not up to anything. And that’s good for me – it’s good for us – even if it isn’t true. And I can’t really be angry with him, because he has good reason to be suspicious. I’ve given him cause in the past and probably will again. I am not a model wife. I can’t be. No matter how much I love him, it won’t be enough.”

— Paula Hawkins

296. “Maidstone,” he says, “in Kent. But I moved.”

— Paula Hawkins

297. “I think perhaps you are being rather hard on yourself.”

— Paula Hawkins

298. “It’s the only thing I have left, my last roll of the dice. If this doesn’t work, I have to let it go. I just have to let it go.”

— Paula Hawkins

299. “He captured movement, he registered nuance, he was empathetic on the page in a way he never seemed to achieve in real life.”

— Paula Hawkins

300. “Twice a day, I am offered a view into other lives, just for a moment. There’s something comforting about the sight of strangers safe at home.”

— Paula Hawkins