Top 380 Paula Hawkins Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “It’s been so long since I’ve heard him say my name like that, and its making me hope.”

— Paula Hawkins

252. “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

253. “And I have to get up early tomorrow morning to catch the train.”

— Paula Hawkins

254. “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

255. “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

256. “I don’t know their names either, so I had to name them myself. Jason, because he’s handsome in a British film star kind of way, not a Depp or a Pitt, but a Firth, or a Jason Isaacs. And Jess just goes with Jason, and it goes with her. It fits her, pretty and carefree as she is. They’re a match, they’re a set. They’re happy, I can tell. They’re what I used to be, they’re Tom and me, five years ago. They’re what I lost, they’re everything I want to be. Evening.”

— Paula Hawkins

257. “This shouldn’t matter, but it does: the sense of shame I feel about an incident is proportionate not just to the gravity of the situation, but also to the number of people who witnessed it.”

— Paula Hawkins

258. “Tom bends down, slips his hands into the waistband of my jeans, grabs hold of them and drags me along the floor into the kitchen. I’m kicking out with my legs, trying to get a hold of something, but I can’t. I can’t see properly – tears are stinging my eyes, everything is a blur. The pain in my head is excruciating as I bump along the floor, and I feel a wave of nausea come over me. There’s hot, white pain as something connects with my temple. Then nothing.”

— Paula Hawkins

259. “You were blind drunk. Filthy, stinking drunk –.”

— Paula Hawkins

260. “I’m fine,” I say, but I have to clench my jaw to stop my teeth from chattering.”

— Paula Hawkins

261. “It’s still warm; there are clouds of midges under the trees and the sunshine is streaming through the leaves, bathing the path in an oddly subterranean light. Above our heads, magpies chatter angrily.”

— Paula Hawkins

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

265. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “It’s all so much more complicated, but of course I can’t explain that to her. Anyway. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been shutting myself away, I suppose, because I don’t want to see the Watsons. Part.”

— Paula Hawkins

280. “I’m frightened, but I’m not sure what I’m afraid of, which just exacerbates the fear. I don’t even know whether there’s anything to be frightened of. I look around the room. My phone is not on the bedside table. My handbag is not on the floor, it’s not hanging over the back of the chair where I usually leave it. I must have had it, though, because I’m in the house, which means I have my keys.”

— Paula Hawkins

281. “I’m going to have to be strong, that’s all there is to it.”

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

283. “For some reason, I am certain that there is something I’m missing, something vital. Perhaps this is just more self-deception, yet another attempt to prove to myself that I’m not worthless.”

— Paula Hawkins

284. “Upstairs, later. I’ve had too much to drink, I can’t see the computer screen properly, everything doubles, trebles. I can read if I hold my hand over one eye. It gives me a headache. Cathy is home, she called out to me and I told her I was in bed, unwell. She knows that I’m drinking.”

— Paula Hawkins

285. “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

286. “The behaviour you’re describing – reading your emails, going through your Internet browser history – you describe all this as though it is commonplace, as though it is normal. It isn’t, Megan. It isn’t normal to invade someone’s privacy to that degree. It’s what is often seen as a form of emotional abuse.”

— Paula Hawkins

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “And in any case, I had made my decision. To do the right thing,.”

— Paula Hawkins

291. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

296. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

298. “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

299. “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

300. “Do you regret it?”

— Paula Hawkins