Top 150 Ruth Ware Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “But posting on Facebook is a false kind of intimacy, and in real life they haven’t seen or spoken to each other for a long time.”

— Ruth Ware

102. “Part of the Lying Game was always to know when the game was up, when to bail out.”

— Ruth Ware

103. “She had the kind of beauty that hurt your eyes if you looked at her for too long, but made it hard to tear your gaze away. It was, Hannah realized, as if a different kind of light were shining on her than on the rest of the room.”

— Ruth Ware

104. “Ker-rist.” It was the shotgun, perched on its wooden pegs, just above eye level. “Haven’t they heard of Chekhov around here?”

— Ruth Ware

105. “Because it was the lies that got me here in the first place. And I have to believe that it’s the truth that will get me out.”

— Ruth Ware

106. “Maddie? Is something wrong?” “Don’t come here,” she whispered, still refusing to look at me. “It’s not safe.”

— Ruth Ware

107. “In books, a bad thing might happen on page 207, that was true. But it would always happen on page 207, no matter what. And when you reread, you could see it coming, watch out for the signs, prepare yourself.”

— Ruth Ware

108. “I knew what it was like to be that girl – to realize in an instant, how incredibly fragile your hold on life could be, how paper-thin the walls of security really were.”

— Ruth Ware

109. “I hadn’t let the demons win. Not this time.”

— Ruth Ware

110. “The magpies are back.”

— Ruth Ware

111. “Eighteen years of not being good enough, not being the daughter I was supposed to be, eighteen years of not measuring up.”

— Ruth Ware

112. “And I am thinking about how, however much we struggled to be free, this is how it always ends, the four of us, skewered together by the past.”

— Ruth Ware

113. “Maybe it wasn’t only John Neville who stole April’s life. Maybe she has done the same.”

— Ruth Ware

114. “The iron fist in the silk glove...”

— Ruth Ware

115. “Thank you, everyone, for coming to join us here on the Aurora on this, its maiden voyage,” he began.”

— Ruth Ware

116. “But I’d seen this kind of willful blindness before, women who insisted their boyfriends weren’t cheating in the face of all the evidence, people working for horrendous employers who’d persuaded themselves they were just following orders and doing what was necessary. There seemed to be no limit to the capacity of people to believe what they wanted to see...”

— Ruth Ware

117. “The wall around the perimeter was child’s play.”

— Ruth Ware

118. “In Topher’s world, people are hard, polished shells, their shiny exteriors hiding the inadequacies and anxieties inside.”

— Ruth Ware

119. “They are here: Luc, Ambrose, and not just them, but ourselves, the ghosts of our past, the slim laughing girls we used to be before that summer ended with a cataclysmic crash, leaving us all scarred in our own ways, trying to move on, lying not for fun but to survive.”

— Ruth Ware

120. “I honestly have no idea what my next move is. I didn’t plan any of this, and now – now I’m stuck. My only way out is through.”

— Ruth Ware

121. “The year I turned twenty-five was pretty bloody awful. If I could have walked away from myself, I would have.”

— Ruth Ware

122. “I told you to use your common sense, Rowan. If breaking into a poison garden is your idea of common.”

— Ruth Ware

123. “And like my dad always used to say, if work was meant to be fun, people wouldn’t pay you to do it.”

— Ruth Ware

124. “Be skeptical, Hal,” her mother’s voice whispered in her ear, “and be doubly skeptical when it’s something you WANT to believe.”

— Ruth Ware

125. “Whiskey, you mean?”

— Ruth Ware

126. “He was grinning like a cat that’s found a particularly juicy mouse in a corner it can’t escape from.”

— Ruth Ware

127. “But I had never despaired, and it was despair that I was feeling now.”

— Ruth Ware

128. “I knew my voice was getting testy, and I tried to keep it calm. If you react, the person you’re talking to reacts back. First rule of social engineering: stay pleasant and others are much more likely to do the same.”

— Ruth Ware

129. “What am I coming to? I am as bad as Kate, haunted by the ghosts of the past.”

— Ruth Ware

130. “I hit the switch and light flooded the shower room – and that’s when I saw it. Written across the steamy mirror, in letters maybe six inches high, were the words STOP DIGGING.”

— Ruth Ware

131. “There were some truths too terrible to tell, some things it was better not to know.”

— Ruth Ware

132. “It even explained something that I had never understood- the way he would let the village boys tease and mock and swagger at him, and he would just take it and take it and take it... and then crack.”

— Ruth Ware

133. “There’s nothing you can’t learn from history to tell you how to deal with the present.”

— Ruth Ware

134. “If I shut my eyes, I could picture him... The thought gave me a kind of peace, the idea that he could be out there somewhere-just beyond my reach. But it was a dishonest peace, and I knew that as much as I could fool myself if I tried hard enough, all I was doing was pushing the pain further down the line until the moment I stopped pretending and let the agony wash back over me.”

— Ruth Ware

135. “She feels the silent sympathy of the books. For a moment she has a visceral longing to pick up one of them, an old favorite perhaps, a novel she knows practically by heart – and sink into the pile of beanbags in the children’s section, shutting out the world.”

— Ruth Ware

136. “People don’t change,” Nina said bitterly. “They just get more punctilious about hiding their true selves.” I chewed my lip while I thought that over. Was it true? I had changed – at least, I told myself I had. I was far more confident, more self-sufficient. All through school I’d relied on my friends for self-esteem and support, wanting to be one of a pack, wanting to fit in. At last I had learned that wasn’t possible, and I’d been happier – albeit more lonely – ever since.”

— Ruth Ware

137. “I hadn’t even brought a book – all my reading matter was on the Kindle.”

— Ruth Ware

138. “Happy?” Topher rounds on him. “Happy? At this rate we’ll be lucky to come out of it with everyone alive.”

— Ruth Ware

139. “There was a noise coming from up ahead. Not footsteps, thank God, but the low hum of computer fans and of air-conditioning working overtime. You hear server rooms before you see them.”

— Ruth Ware

140. “And for a killer, that’s a kind of superpower.”

— Ruth Ware

141. “Your average surgeon’s like a little boy who takes apart his dad’s watch to see how it works and then can’t get it back together. The more skilled you get, the better you get at reassembling the parts. But we always leave a scar.”

— Ruth Ware

142. “Haven’t they heard of Chekhov around here?”

— Ruth Ware

143. “Behind him is a girl with fluffy yellow hair that cannot possibly be her real shade. It’s the color of buttercups and the texture of dandelion fluff.”

— Ruth Ware

144. “I keep my earbuds shoved into my ears on the minibus from Geneva Airport.”

— Ruth Ware

145. “You’re not some kind of pregnant Miss Marple.”

— Ruth Ware

146. “It’s like someone has come in and taken over and everything is out of my hands and moving in a direction I don’t want and can’t control.”

— Ruth Ware

147. “He had that weird mix of swagger and self-consciousness that seemed unique to males in their late teens.”

— Ruth Ware

148. “I had been expecting something ostentatious, a McMansion, maybe, or a sprawling log-built ranch.”

— Ruth Ware

149. “You’ve done enough poking around, this is getting stupid. You’re not some kind of pregnant Miss Marple.”

— Ruth Ware

150. “It’s like something out of a novel.”

— Ruth Ware