Top 380 Paula Hawkins Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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 alright.”

— Paula Hawkins

253. “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

254. “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

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 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

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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

262. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

264. “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

265. “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

266. “Do you regret it?”

— Paula Hawkins

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

280. “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

281. “It’s her voice.”

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “No one warned you about that when you were younger, no one told you how slow you would become, and how bored you would be by your slowness.”

— Paula Hawkins

287. “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

288. “It comes from shared experience, from knowing how it feels to be broken. Hollowness: that I understand.”

— Paula Hawkins

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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