Top 380 Paula Hawkins Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “I wasn’t being strong. I was being reckless, and there’s no telling how much damage I’ve done.”

— Paula Hawkins

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

306. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

308. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

310. “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

311. “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

312. “Maidstone,” he says, “in Kent. But I moved.”

— Paula Hawkins

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

328. “It’s her voice.”

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

334. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

337. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

341. “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

342. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

345. “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

346. “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

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

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins

349. “I didn’t want to draw attention to her resting place, but I couldn’t leave her without remembrance.”

— Paula Hawkins

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

— Paula Hawkins