Top 380 Paula Hawkins Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 8

251. “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

252. “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.”

— Paula Hawkins

253. “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

254. “I’m not here for you, I couldn’t be less interested.”

— Paula Hawkins

255. “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

256. “I’m doing the things she did: drinking alone and snooping on him. The things she did and he hated. But recently – as recently as this morning – things have shifted. If he’s going to lie, then I’m going to check up on him. That’s a fair deal, isn’t it? I feel I’m owed a bit of fairness.”

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

258. “Perhaps this is just more self-deception, yet another attempt to prove to myself that I’m not worthless. But perhaps it’s real.”

— Paula Hawkins

259. “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

260. “I can imagine the feel of his hands, the weight of them, reassuring and protective. Sometimes I catch myself trying to remember the last time I had meaningful physical contact with another person, just a hug or a heartfelt squeeze of my hand, and my heart twitches.”

— Paula Hawkins

261. “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

262. “I’m not just going to be ignored.”

— Paula Hawkins

263. “I just had to hope that one day we would have the money, and in the meantime I had to bite back the tears that came, hot and fast, every time I saw a stranger with a bump, every time I heard someone else’s happy news.”

— Paula Hawkins

264. “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

265. “He had this look on his face of shock, of hurt. I wanted to say to her, It’s no good, you won’t be able to help him now, but then I realized she wasn’t trying to stop the bleeding. She was making sure. Twisting the corkscrew in, farther and farther, ripping into his throat, and all the time she was talking to him softly, softly. I couldn’t hear what she was saying.”

— Paula Hawkins

266. “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

267. “I wonder whether we would have loved the weaker, flawed, unembellished version. I think that I would. I would have forgiven his mistakes and his failures. I have committed enough of my own.”

— Paula Hawkins

268. “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

269. “He smiles – that wide, beautiful smile that used to make me melt – and I start to sob. I can’t believe it, can’t believe we are brought to this, that the greatest happiness I have ever known – my life with him – was an illusion.”

— Paula Hawkins

270. “I snap the laptop shut and jump to my feet, knocking my.”

— Paula Hawkins

271. “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

272. “And he was right, I know we can’t. We shouldn’t, we ought not to, but we will. It won’t be the last time. He won’t say no to me. I was thinking about it on the way home, and that’s the thing I like most about it, having power over someone. That’s the intoxicating thing.”

— Paula Hawkins

273. “I can’t deny that there’s a part of me that finds the idea of meeting Kamal thrilling.”

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

275. “Tom said about Scott and Megan came from Anna, and no one knows better than I do that she can’t be trusted.”

— Paula Hawkins

276. “I didn’t even get upset. I was just astounded. And when I brought it up with Tom – calmly, matter-of-factly – he was just as baffled as I was.”

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

278. “It’s not a photo I’ve seen before.”

— Paula Hawkins

279. “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

280. “Angela was a vandal when it came to books: a cracker of spines, a dog-earer of pages, a scribbler in margins.”

— Paula Hawkins

281. “Cathy gets up early to clean the house every Saturday, no matter what. It could be her birthday, it could be the morning of the Rapture – Cathy will get up early on Saturday to clean.”

— Paula Hawkins

282. “I can see her now, in the spare room upstairs, music blaring, window open, a brush in her hand, an enormous canvas leaning against the wall. She’ll be there until midnight; Jason knows not to bother her when she’s working.”

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

284. “I’m almost at the station, just passing the Crown, when I feel a hand on my arm and I wheel around, slipping off the pavement and into the road.”

— Paula Hawkins

285. “I had a teacher at school who told me once that I was a mistress of self-reinvention. I.”

— Paula Hawkins

286. “We’re in the car park at Wilton Lake. We used to come here sometimes, to go swimming on really hot days. Today we’re just sitting side by side in Tom’s car, windows down, letting the warm breeze in. I want to lean my head back against the headrest and close my eyes and smell the pine and listen to the birds. I want to hold his hand and stay here all day.”

— Paula Hawkins

287. “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.”

— Paula Hawkins

288. “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

289. “Tom’s whole life was constructed on lies – falsehoods and half-truths told to make him look better, stronger, more interesting than he was.”

— Paula Hawkins

290. “And this time” – he glances up at me – “I promise I’ll make sure she won’t bother us anymore.” Anna’s.”

— Paula Hawkins

291. “I’m going to do the right thing. I’m going to do everything right. If I do everything right, then nothing can go wrong. Or if it does, it cannot be my fault.”

— Paula Hawkins

292. “It must take the most incredible self-control, that stillness, that passivity; it must be exhausting.”

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

294. “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

295. “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

296. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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