Top 150 Ruth Ware Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “My friend Erin says we all have demons inside us, voices that whisper we’re no good, that if we don’t make this promotion or ace that exam we’ll reveal to the world exactly what kind of worthless sacks of skin and sinew we really are Maybe that’s true. Maybe mine just have louder voices.”

— Ruth Ware

2. “Generally, if people write to you, it’s because they liked the book, although I have had a few messages telling me what a terrible person I am. But even when they’re nice, it’s still odd and uncomfortable-someone telling you their reaction to your private thoughts, like reading someone’s opinion on your diary. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to that feeling, however long I write.”

— Ruth Ware

3. “There’s a reason why we keep thoughts inside our heads for the most part – they’re not safe to be let out in public.”

— Ruth Ware

4. “People don’t change,” Nina said bitterly. “They just get more punctilious about hiding their true selves.”

— Ruth Ware

5. “But I was almost certain – almost completely certain – that she was the woman in cabin 10.”

— Ruth Ware

6. “You can’t influence fate, or change what’s out of your control. But you can choose what you yourself do with the cards you’re dealt.”

— Ruth Ware

7. “He was selfish. A selfish, self-centered man who had barely asked me a single personal question – not even how my journey had been. He just didn’t care.”

— Ruth Ware

8. “I jumped to a conclusion that was so wrong, it was almost completely right.”

— Ruth Ware

9. “Cognitive behavioral therapy, counseling, psychotherapy – none of it really worked in the way that the pills did. Lissie says she finds the notion of chemically rebalancing your mood scary, she says it’s the idea of taking something that could alter how she really is. But I don’t see it that way; for me it’s like wearing makeup – not a disguise, but a way of making myself more how I really am, less raw. The best me I can be.”

— Ruth Ware

10. “She said that when she was a girl and in a rage with a friend, she used to write their name on the soles of her feet in chalk, and walk until the name was gone. She said by the time the chalk had worn away, her resentment would have faded too.”

— Ruth Ware

11. “It was growing dark, and somehow the shadows made it feel as if all the trees had taken a collective step towards the house, edging in to shut out the sky.”

— Ruth Ware

12. “Clare watched them from the far sofa, and I found myself watching her, remembering how she loved to observe, how she used to throw a remark out, like a pebble into a pond, and then back quietly away to watch the ripples as people scrapped it out. It was not an endearing habit, but it was one I could not condemn. I understood it too well. I, too, am happier watching than being watched.”

— Ruth Ware

13. “You’re never an ex-addict, you’re just an addict who hasn’t had a fix in a while.”

— Ruth Ware

14. “I am running. I am running through moonlit woods, with branches ripping at my clothes and my feet catching in the snow-bowed bracken.”

— Ruth Ware

15. “Time healed, they said, but it wasn’t true, or not completely. The first raw wound of loss had closed and silvered over, yes, but the scar it had left would never heal. It would always be there, aching and tender.”

— Ruth Ware

16. “A wall, after all, isn’t just about keeping others out. It can also be for trapping people inside.”

— Ruth Ware

17. “So having a routine is important. It gives you something to hang on to, something to differentiate the weekdays from the weekends. My day starts like this. At.”

— Ruth Ware

18. “If there’s one thing I dislike more than being hurt, it’s being seen to be hurt.”

— Ruth Ware

19. “Its size, along with the perfection of its paintwork, gave it a curiously toylike quality, and as I stepped onto the narrow steel gangway I had a sudden disorienting image of the Aurora as a ship imprisoned in a bottle – tiny, perfect, isolated, and unreal – and of myself, shrinking down to match it with every step I took towards the boat.”

— Ruth Ware

20. “I always thought that being self-sufficient was a strength, but now I realize it’s a kind of weakness, too.”

— Ruth Ware

21. “The cards do not predict the future. All thy can do is show us how a given situation may turn out, based on the energies we bring to the reading. Another day, another mood, a different set of energies, and the same question could have a completely different answer... We have free will. The answer the cards give can turn us in our path.”

— Ruth Ware

22. “He was a figment of imagination. A false memory, implanted by my own hopes.”

— Ruth Ware

23. “There was something strangely naked about it, like we were on a stage set, playing our parts to an audience of eyes out there in the wood.”

— Ruth Ware

24. “This place felt like a tomb. Maybe it was mine.”

— Ruth Ware

25. “There is no gray when you’re young. There’s only goodies and baddies, right and wrong. The rules are very clear – a playground morality of ethical lines drawn out like a netball pitch, with clear fouls and penalties.”

— Ruth Ware

26. “And it’s a story about hope – about how we have to go on, after the unbearable has happened. Make the most of our lives, for the sake of the people who gave theirs.”

— Ruth Ware

27. “It’s not that Nina doesn’t feel stuff. She just deals with it differently than most people. Sarcasm is her defense against life.”

— Ruth Ware

28. “Somehow the realization stiffened my nerve. We weren’t sixteen anymore. We didn’t have to hang around like there was an invisible umbilical cord tethering us together. We’d gone our separate ways and all survived.”

— Ruth Ware

29. “Excitement? Yes. Trepidation too, a good deal of it. But most of all something she hadn’t dared to feel in many years. Hope.”

— Ruth Ware

30. “STOP DIGGING.′ The letters on the mirror were etched in my memory. Now, as I finished my make-up with a swipe of lip-gloss, I huffed on the mirror, and wrote in the steam obscuring my reflection one word: ‘NO’.”

— Ruth Ware

31. “Once, a long time ago, a teacher at school had called Hal “a little mouse,” and the description had offended her, though she hadn’t really known why. But now she knew why. Whatever she looked like on the surface, inside, deep in the core of her, she was not a mouse, but something quite different: a rat – small, dark, tenacious, and dogged. And now she felt like a cornered rat, fighting to survive.”

— Ruth Ware

32. “For a travel journalist I’m worryingly bad at geography.”

— Ruth Ware

33. “Maybe that was closer to the truth – we weren’t captor and captive, but two animals in different compartments of the same cage. Hers was just slightly larger.”

— Ruth Ware

34. “How could it be right that some people had so much, while others had so little?”

— Ruth Ware

35. “Poor Flo,” I said. “Did she pull the trigger?” Nina asked. “I – I assume so. I don’t know. She was holding it.” “I thought you were.” “Me?”

— Ruth Ware

36. “There are days when I don’t hear a single human voice, apart from the radio, and you know what? I quite like that.”

— Ruth Ware

37. “Ben has seen me without makeup. And he walked away. I was angry for a long time, but in the end, I realized, I don’t blame him. The year I turned twenty-five was pretty bloody awful. If I could have walked away from myself, I would have.”

— Ruth Ware

38. “The people who came to her booth were seeking meaning and control – but they were looking in the wrong place. When they gave themselves over to superstition, they were giving up on shaping their own destiny.”

— Ruth Ware

39. “It confirmed what I already knew. The James Cooper I thought I knew never existed. It was a figment of imagination, a false memory implanted by my own hopes.”

— Ruth Ware

40. “I hate being driven – driving is like karaoke – your own is epic, other people’s is just embarrassing or alarming.”

— Ruth Ware

41. “I wanted to scream. The panic built inside me like a volcano, pressing up through the layers of closed throat and clenched teeth. And then I thought, in a kind of delirium – if I scream, what’s the worst that can happen? Someone might hear? Let them hear.”

— Ruth Ware

42. “Trepassen was too Gothic and gloomy to ever feel like a truly welcoming place.”

— Ruth Ware

43. “People do go mad, you know, if you stop them from sleeping for long enough...”

— Ruth Ware

44. “The ghosts, she had sobbed. The ghosts wouldn’t like it.”

— Ruth Ware

45. “There is no gray when you’re young. There’s only goodies and baddies, right and wrong.”

— Ruth Ware

46. “I wanted to write in my diary – to do as I always do when things get too much – let it out onto the page, like a kind of bloodletting, letting the ink and paper soak up all the grief and anger and fear until I can cope again.”

— Ruth Ware

47. “Here, in this house the ghosts of our past are real.”

— Ruth Ware

48. “That’s the trouble with having a “click” as Mary Wren might call it. When you define yourself by walls, who’s in, who’s out. The people on the other side of the wall become, not just them, but them. The outsiders. The opposition. The enemy.”

— Ruth Ware

49. “Written across the steamy mirror, in letters maybe six inches high, were the words ‘STOP DIGGING’.”

— Ruth Ware

50. “I would never sleep. I knew that. Not with my blood ringing in my ears, and my heart beating an angry staccato rhythm in my chest. I would never relax.”

— Ruth Ware