Top 380 Paula Hawkins Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “I should have been prepared for it, should have expected it, but somehow I didn’t.”

— Paula Hawkins

252. “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

253. “Do you regret it?”

— Paula Hawkins

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

261. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

271. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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. “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

279. “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

280. “There are familiar faces on these trains, people I see every week, going to and fro. I recognize them and they probably recognize me.”

— Paula Hawkins

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

289. “Cathy’s a nice person, in a forceful sort of way. She makes you notice her niceness.”

— Paula Hawkins

290. “I knew as I was agreeing that it wasn’t a good idea. What I know about Scott, from the papers, is almost nothing. What I know from my own observations, I don’t really know. I don’t know anything about Scott. I know things about Jason – who, I have to keep reminding myself, doesn’t exist. All I know for sure – for absolutely certain – is that Scott’s wife has been missing for a week. I know that he is probably a suspect. And I know, because I saw that kiss, that he has a motive to kill her.”

— Paula Hawkins

291. “I know that on warm summer evenings, the occupants of this house, Jason and Jess, sometimes climb out of the large sash window to sit on the makeshift terrace on top of the kitchen-extension roof.”

— Paula Hawkins

292. “I could feel the colour rising to my cheeks; if this man didn’t know I was lying then, he didn’t deserve to be on the police force.”

— Paula Hawkins

293. “Louise’s grief was like the river: constant and ever-changing. It rippled, flooded, ebbed and flowed, some days cold and dark and deep, some days swift and blinding.”

— Paula Hawkins

294. “I couldn’t possibly see her expression at that distance, but I felt when I was looking at her that she was alone. More than alone – lonely.”

— Paula Hawkins

295. “She wanted to chat in person and I thought it might be best. I’m sorry, OK? We just talked. We met in a crappy coffee shop in Ashbury and talked for twenty minutes – half an hour, tops. OK?”

— Paula Hawkins

296. “All those plans I had – photography courses and cookery classes – when it comes down to it, they.”

— Paula Hawkins

297. “I half ran back to the car, feeling needlessly afraid. I was thinking of the violence of my last meeting with Scott, of the way he was at the end – wild and paranoiac, on the edge of madness. There’ll be no peace for him now. How can there be? I think about that, and the way he used to be – the way they used to be, the way I imagined them to be – and I feel bereft. I feel their loss, too.”

— Paula Hawkins

298. “He wanted me to talk afterwards, about what happened.”

— Paula Hawkins

299. “You know you can’t believe half the stuff they print in the newspapers.”

— Paula Hawkins

300. “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