Top 150 Ruth Ware Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 4

51. “I love ports. I love the smell of tar and sea air, and the scream of the gulls. Maybe it’s years of taking the ferry to France for summer holidays, but a harbor gives me a feeling of freedom in a way that an airport never does. Airports say work and security checks and delays. Ports say... I don’t know. Something completely different. Escape, maybe.”

— Ruth Ware

52. “One for sorrow Two for joy Three for a girl Four for a boy Five for silver Six for gold Seven for a secret Never to be told.”

— Ruth Ware

53. “I know what it’s like. Don’t you see? I know what she must have felt like, when someone came for her in the middle of the night. That’s why I have to find out who did this to her.”

— Ruth Ware

54. “Airports say work and security checks and delays. Ports say... I don’t know. Something completely different. Escape, maybe.”

— Ruth Ware

55. “I’m so sorry, she’d said, you’re so brave, and there was genuine pity in her face, but also a kind of glee, the sort you see sometimes when teens are interviewed about the tragic death of a friend. The sadness is there, and it’s real, but there’s an underlying thrill at the drama of it all, the.”

— Ruth Ware

56. “I always start my morning the same way. Maybe it’s something about living alone – you’re able to get set in your ways, there’s no outside disruptions, no flatmates to hoover up the last of the milk, no cat coughing up a hairball on the rug. You know that what you left in the cupboard the night before will be in the cupboard when you wake up. You’re in control. Or.”

— Ruth Ware

57. “There are some things you shouldn’t have to remember.”

— Ruth Ware

58. “She had discovered that the most important truths often lay in what people didn’t say, and learned to read the secrets that they hid in plain sight, in their faces, and in their clothes, and in the expressions that flitted across their faces when they thought no one was watching.”

— Ruth Ware

59. “It’s always strange meeting another writer. A little feeling of camaraderie. A masonic bond. I wonder if plumbers feel like this when meeting other plumbers, or if accountants give each other secret nods. Maybe it’s because we meet comparatively rarely – writers tend to spend the bulk of their working life alone.”

— Ruth Ware

60. “She told me children were nothing but padlocks on the patriarchal shackles of marriage. That.”

— Ruth Ware

61. “It was... I don’t know. I don’t know how to put it. It was pride, I think. A kind of disbelief at my own stupidity. The thought that I’d loved him so much, and had been so mistaken. How could I? How could I have been so incredibly, unbelievably wrong?”

— Ruth Ware

62. “Yes. Yes, I take antidepressants. So what? No.”

— Ruth Ware

63. “Better to achieve perfect marks on an easy test than flunk a hard one, that was my motto.”

— Ruth Ware

64. “Don’t let yourself get caught up in what-ifs. That way madness lies.”

— Ruth Ware

65. “You cannot, by definition, offend someone who’s not here. Offence has to be taken, not just given.”

— Ruth Ware

66. “There are no other runners in my family Dash or not that I know of – but my grandmother was a walker. She said that when she was a girl and in a rage with a friend, she used to write her friends name on the soles of her feet in shock, and walk until then he was gone. She said by the time the truck was one away, resentment what is seated, too.”

— Ruth Ware

67. “Back inside the suite, I got into my jeans and boots, and my favorite hoodie. Then I checked the lock on the cabin door and huddled on the sofa with a cushion hugged to my chest. There was no possibility of sleep now.”

— Ruth Ware

68. “As the shower trickled and gurgled to a halt, I groped my way back to the door, my dripping hair plastered to my face, and felt for the light. I hit the switch and light flooded the shower room – and that’s when I saw it.”

— Ruth Ware

69. “Very well. May I offer you a glass of champagne?” She indicated a tray on a small table by the entrance, and I nodded and took a frosted flute. I knew I should keep a clear head for tomorrow, but one glass for Dutch courage couldn’t hurt.”

— Ruth Ware

70. “The night was drawing in, and the house felt more and more like a glass cage, blasting its light blindly out into the dusk, like a lantern in the dark. I imagined a thousand moths circling and shivering, drawn inexorably to its glow, only to perish against the cold inhospitable glass.”

— Ruth Ware

71. “I clicked on mail and downloaded my e-mails, chewing my nails as they popped one by one into the in-box.”

— Ruth Ware

72. “The family had arrived. The real test was about to begin. She felt suddenly sick with nerves, lightheaded with tension. This was it. A face-to-face encounter with her supposed relatives. Was she really going to do this? She played people for a living – in her moments of clear-eyed honesty, she knew that. But this was different. This wasn’t just telling gullible people what they wanted to hear or already knew. This was a crime.”

— Ruth Ware

73. “It was not exactly a longing to stay here, for Trepassen was too gothic and gloomy to ever feel like a truly welcoming place. It had the sense of a house where people had suffered in silence, where meals had been eaten in tension and fear, where secrets had been concealed, and where unhappiness had reigned more often than contentment.”

— Ruth Ware

74. “So you write plays?” “Yes. I’m always rather jealous of novelists – the way you get to control everything. You don’t have to deal with actors massacring your best lines.”

— Ruth Ware

75. “It didn’t help that, unlike a ferry, there were no floor plans or maps, and minimal signage – supposed to help the impression that this was a private home that you just happened to share with a load of rich people.”

— Ruth Ware

76. “The whole thing had been painful to the point of nausea, made worse by covert sympathetic looks from Nina. If there’s one thing I dislike more than being hurt, it’s being seen to be hurt. I’ve always preferred to creep away and lick my wounds in private.”

— Ruth Ware

77. “I know him by heart.”

— Ruth Ware

78. “I wanted to leave so badly it hurt – to be back at home, in my own bed, with my own things, in the blissful peace and quiet.”

— Ruth Ware

79. “A lie. I’d almost forgotten how they feel on my tongue, slick and sickening.”

— Ruth Ware

80. “And we were both dazed from the fallout, trying not to think too much, feel too much. Easier just to shut down. “What.”

— Ruth Ware

81. “Tina is one of those women who thinks every bit of estrogen in the boardroom is a threat to her own existence.”

— Ruth Ware

82. “What was going to happen to me? There were only two possibilities – they were going to let me go at some point. Or they were going to kill me.”

— Ruth Ware

83. “I knew him so that if I touched his face in the dark, I would know it was him. I.”

— Ruth Ware

84. “Like an idiot I’d taken the bait, exploded on cue. It was done. “I’m.”

— Ruth Ware

85. “Here’s to us,” she said, holding the bottle high, the moonlight striking off the glass. “May we never grow old.”

— Ruth Ware

86. “There’s a disappointment in the banality of what makes people tick, but at the same time, there’s a kind of fascination at seeing the inner coils and cogs. The.”

— Ruth Ware

87. “I switched the light out and drew the cover across myself, but I didn’t sleep. Instead I lay on my side watching the sea, rising and falling in strange, hypnotic silence outside the thick, storm-proof panes. And I thought, there is a murderer on this boat. And no one knows but me.”

— Ruth Ware

88. “When they gave themselves over to superstition, they were giving up on shaping their own destiny.”

— Ruth Ware

89. “I was just worried, okay? For you. Not about you.” I.”

— Ruth Ware

90. “There was a little spritz of sequined leaves across the right shoulder because you didn’t seem to be able to get away with none. Apparently the majority of ball gowns were designed by five-year-old girls armed with glitter guns, but at least this one didn’t look entirely like an explosion in a Barbie factory.”

— Ruth Ware

91. “Remember, I’m a doctor. I know at least 3 ways to kill you without leaving a trace. Nx.”

— Ruth Ware

92. “Apparently the majority of ball gowns were designed by five-year-old girls armed with glitter guns, but at least this one didn’t look entirely like an explosion in a Barbie factory. I.”

— Ruth Ware

93. “I knew what Nilsson wanted. He wanted me to forget what I’d heard, the scream, the stealthy slide of the screen door, and that horrible, huge slithering splash.”

— Ruth Ware

94. “Because what I realized, as I held his hand and he bled all over the floor, was that my anger, which I had thought was black and insuperable.”

— Ruth Ware

95. “It’s not just the snow; it’s a hundredweight of unwelcome memories bearing down on me.”

— Ruth Ware

96. “It’s like opening up the back of the machine to see the crude workings grinding away inside. There’s a disappointment in the banality of what makes people tick, but at the same time, there’s a kind of fascination at seeing the inner coils and cogs. The trouble is that the next day they almost invariably resent you for having seen them naked and unguarded. So I’m deliberately reserved and noncommittal, trying not to lead them on.”

— Ruth Ware

97. “And even in spite of my ovaries, I can remember a simple two-digit number.”

— Ruth Ware

98. “Tight-knit friendships are all very well and good, but they can close us off from other chances. They can cost us a great deal, in the end.”

— Ruth Ware

99. “But his grief, the gaping hole left after my mother died- it’s too close to my own. Seeing his grief, year after year, it only magnifies my own. My Mother was the glue that held us all together. Now, with her missing, there are only people in pain, unable to heal each other.”

— Ruth Ware

100. “She didn’t believe in anything mystical, but she did believe in the power of the cards to reveal something about the querent, both to the reader and to the sitter themselves.”

— Ruth Ware