Top 380 Paula Hawkins Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

305. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

308. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

310. “As for him “feeling dead”, that’s probably just a consequence of him being gone from your life for so long. In some sense he no longer feels real to you.”

— Paula Hawkins

311. “I know immediately that’s it. I’m awake. The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.”

— Paula Hawkins

312. “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

313. “My legs are still trembling as I climb the steps to Corly station. I’ve been shaking like this for hours, it must be the adrenaline, my heart just won’t slow down. The train is packed – no chance of a seat here, it’s not like getting on at Euston, so I have to stand, midway through a carriage. It’s like a sweatbox. I’m trying to breathe slowly, my eyes cast down to my feet. I’m just trying to get a handle on what I’m feeling. Exultation, fear, confusion and guilt. Mostly guilt.”

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

315. “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

316. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

318. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

320. “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

321. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

323. “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

324. “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

325. “It’s the only thing I have left, my last roll of the dice. If this doesn’t work, I have to let it go. I just have to let it go.”

— Paula Hawkins

326. “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

327. “Yesterday – sensible, clearheaded, 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. She has no past, no future. She exists purely in the moment. Drunk Rachel – wanting to be part of the story, needing a way to persuade Scott to talk to her – she lied. I lied.”

— Paula Hawkins

328. “I was still young, there was still plenty of time, but failure cloaked me like a mantle, it overwhelmed me, dragged me under, and I gave up hope.”

— Paula Hawkins

329. “The trick is to fool yourself into thinking that you’re headed somewhere: just pick a spot and set off towards it.”

— Paula Hawkins

330. “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

331. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “He loves me so much it makes me ache.”

— Paula Hawkins

337. “For the first five years I knew him, I was never Rachel, always Rach.”

— Paula Hawkins

338. “I apologized without being sure what I was apologizing for.”

— Paula Hawkins

339. “I realize that perhaps, after all, she isn’t so different from me. She’s isolated and lonely too.”

— Paula Hawkins

340. “I see them as others do not; even their owners probably don’t see them from this perspective.”

— Paula Hawkins

341. “I’ll find something, here or elsewhere, I know I will.”

— Paula Hawkins

342. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

345. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

348. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins