Top 380 Paula Hawkins Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “I feel like myself – the myself I used to be.”

— Paula Hawkins

252. “She needed to tell him that she’d looked at his latest piece of writing too, that she didn’t like it, all the to-ing and fro-ing, all that jumping around in the timeline. Like the last one, the awful crime thing. Just start at the beginning, for God’s sake.”

— Paula Hawkins

253. “I had every right to be angry, didn’t I? We were trying to have a baby – shouldn’t we have been prepared to make sacrifices? I would have cut off a limb if it meant I could have had a child. Couldn’t he have forgone a weekend in Vegas?”

— Paula Hawkins

254. “But appearances are deceptive, for this is a deathly place. The water, dark and glassy, hides what lies beneath: weeds to entangle you, to drag you down; jagged rocks to slice through flesh. Above looms the grey slate cliff: a dare, a provocation.”

— Paula Hawkins

255. “The horror of it is almost too much to bear. I cannot understand how Scott is still breathing. It should have killed him, should have sucked the life right out of him. Somehow, though, he is still here.”

— Paula Hawkins

256. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had anything worth keeping a clear head for.”

— Paula Hawkins

257. “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

258. “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.”

— Paula Hawkins

259. “It’s been so long since I’ve heard him say my name like that, and its making me hope.”

— Paula Hawkins

260. “He is watching me, waiting for me to say something, to.”

— Paula Hawkins

261. “They always go for you, the lonely ones, don’t they? They make a beeline straight for you.”

— Paula Hawkins

262. “I forgot to feel what I was supposed to be feeling...”

— Paula Hawkins

263. “I wait for the memory to come. Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes it’s there in front of my eyes in seconds. Sometimes it doesn’t come at all.”

— Paula Hawkins

264. “I think of the things her real friends said about her: wonderful, funny, beautiful, warmhearted. Loved. She made a mistake. It happens.”

— Paula Hawkins

265. “In the end I really thought I could just walk away from it, a little bruised, but no real harm done. But it’s not that simple any longer.”

— Paula Hawkins

266. “I went from being a drinker to being a drunk, and there’s nothing more boring than that.”

— Paula Hawkins

267. “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

268. “That, at least, is true. He hasn’t replied. I didn’t expect him to. I am cut off from him, shut out. The things.”

— Paula Hawkins

269. “Do you regret it?”

— Paula Hawkins

270. “I wasn’t being strong. I was being reckless, and there’s no telling how much damage I’ve done.”

— Paula Hawkins

271. “That was my first home. Not my parents’ place, not a flatshare with other students, my first home. I can’t bear to look at it. Well, I can, I do, I want to, I don’t want to, I try not to. Every day I tell myself not to look, and every day I look. I can’t help myself, even though there is nothing I want to see there, even though anything I do see will hurt me. Even.”

— Paula Hawkins

272. “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

273. “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

274. “I was in the underpass and he was coming towards me, one slap across the mouth and then his fist raised, keys in his hand, searing pain as the serrated metal smashed down against my skull.”

— Paula Hawkins

275. “Some days, I feel so bad that I have to drink; some days I feel so bad that I can’t.”

— Paula Hawkins

276. “I just listen. Sitting here in the morning, eyes closed.”

— Paula Hawkins

277. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

282. “So I never feel bad enough. I feel bad, but the thing that I’ve done – it’s removed from me. It’s like it doesn’t belong to me.”

— Paula Hawkins

283. “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

284. “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

285. “I keep trying to grasp at it, to hold on to it, but the harder I struggle, the fainter and the further away it gets.”

— Paula Hawkins

286. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

288. “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

289. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

291. “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

292. “The thing about being barren is that you’re not allowed to get away from it. Not when you’re in your thirties. My friends were having children, friends of friends were having children, pregnancy and birth and first birthday parties were everywhere. I was asked about it all the time.”

— Paula Hawkins

293. “Nel once told me that she only ever slept with married men, because they were discreet and undemanding and they let her get on with her life.”

— Paula Hawkins

294. “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

295. “Scott the other night: the dream was just my brain picking all that apart.”

— Paula Hawkins

296. “He’s taken a shower, washed me off his skin. He looks better for it, but he won’t look me in the eye when he asks if I’d like a coffee. This isn’t what I wanted: none of this is right. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to lose control again.”

— Paula Hawkins

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins