Top 380 Paula Hawkins Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “I feel like myself – the myself I used to be.”

— Paula Hawkins

302. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

305. “She has no past, no future. She exists purely in the moment. Drunk.”

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

307. “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

308. “I’m well aware there is no job more important than that of raising a child, but the problem is that it isn’t valued. Not in the sense that counts to me at the moment, which is financial.”

— Paula Hawkins

309. “Maybe that was the moment when things started to go wrong, the moment when I imagined us no longer a couple, but a family; and after that, once I had that picture in my head, just the two of us could never be enough.”

— Paula Hawkins

310. “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

311. “This tabloid story, supposedly leaked by someone in the police, about Megan’s involvement in the death of a child.”

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

321. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

324. “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

325. “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

326. “What if the thing I’m looking for can never be found? What.”

— Paula Hawkins

327. “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

328. “Now, I think he might be dead.”

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

331. “But with the mind, I think, there are no quick fixes.”

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

333. “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

334. “All those plans I had – photography courses and cookery classes – when it comes down to it, they feel a bit pointless, as if I’m playing at real life instead of actually living it.”

— Paula Hawkins

335. “I can’t do this, I can’t just be a wife.”

— Paula Hawkins

336. “I don’t remember losing it. I think that over time it got chipped away, bit by bit, by life, by the living of it.”

— Paula Hawkins

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “Tom said he was going to patch it up, but he didn’t, and I didn’t want to pester him about it.”

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

344. “Murky, speculative stuff, a smear campaign on a dead woman. It’s despicable.”

— Paula Hawkins

345. “I’m stupidly pleased that he doesn’t like her, either; another thing we have in common, another thread to bind us.”

— Paula Hawkins

346. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

348. “He closed his eyes so that he didn’t have to watch me choke.”

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

350. “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