Top 150 Ruth Ware Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— Ruth Ware

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

— Ruth Ware

105. “The magpies are back.”

— Ruth Ware

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

— Ruth Ware

107. “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

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

— Ruth Ware

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

— Ruth Ware

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Ruth Ware

113. “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

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

— Ruth Ware

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Ruth Ware

118. “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

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

— Ruth Ware

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Ruth Ware

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

— Ruth Ware

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

— Ruth Ware

125. “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

126. “She was being silly. He was probably just a lonely middle-aged man with no talent for taking a graceful brush-off. But one thing was for sure: she had absolutely no intention of asking John Neville for help, ever again.”

— Ruth Ware

127. “I take a breath and hold it for a long time, looking down at Freya’s slumbering face. And then I text back. Everything’s fine. Dad’s meeting us at Aviemore. I love you. It’s a lie; I know that now. But for her, for Freya, I can keep lying. And maybe one day I can make it true.”

— Ruth Ware

128. “Never show them you’re shocked, nothing makes people more defensive than censure. You’re their priest, Hal. This is a confessional, of a sort. Be open – and they will give you the truth.”

— Ruth Ware

129. “It’s totally alien to me – as you know, I live for travel. I can’t imagine confining yourself to a petty little country like Norway when the restaurants and capitals of the world await.”

— Ruth Ware

130. “But perhaps that is why she loves him so much – the unattainability of him, the rare flashes of vulnerability that he reserves for her alone.”

— Ruth Ware

131. “She tries not to be judgmental about reading – No such thing as a guilty pleasure is Cathy’s motto, and it’s one Hannah largely subscribes to. Jeffrey Archer to Geoffrey Chaucer, Outlander to The Outsider – they all keep the wheels of publishing turning and money coming into the tills, and if they give someone a happy few hours, that’s good enough for her.”

— Ruth Ware

132. “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

133. “Whiskey, you mean?”

— Ruth Ware

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

— Ruth Ware

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

— Ruth Ware

136. “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

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

— Ruth Ware

138. “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

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

— Ruth Ware

140. “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

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

— Ruth Ware

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

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

— Ruth Ware

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

— Ruth Ware

147. “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

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

— Ruth Ware

149. “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

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

— Ruth Ware