Top 100 Paula Hawkins Quotes
#1. As for him "feeling dead", that's probably just a consequence of him being gone from your life for so long. In some sense he no longer feels real to you.
Paula Hawkins
#2. I'm not even that upset about the rejection any more. What bothers me most is that I haven't got to the end of my story, and I can't start over with someone else, it's too hard.
Paula Hawkins
#3. People think it's terribly sad to spend Christmas alone, but it's no sadder, really, than spending any other day alone, is it?
Paula Hawkins
#4. But then I think, this happens sometimes, doesn't it? People you have a history with, they won't let you go, and as hard as you might try, you can't disentangle yourself, can't set yourself free. Maybe after a while you just stop trying.
Paula Hawkins
#5. Beware a calm surface - you never know what lies beneath.
Paula Hawkins
#6. 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
#7. I'm well aware that there is no job more important than that of raising a child, but the problem is that it isn't valued.
Paula Hawkins
#8. let's be honest: women are still only really valued for two things - their looks and their role as mothers.
Paula Hawkins
#10. But I did become sadder, and sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for everyone around them.
Paula Hawkins
#11. I watch him come, I watch him, and I don't move until he's almost upon me, and then I swing. I jam the vicious twist of the corkscrew into his neck.
Paula Hawkins
#12. When I look at Tom, I thank God that he found me, too, that I was there to rescue him from that woman. She'd have driven him mad in the end, I really think that - she'd have ground him down, she'd have made him into something he's not.
Paula Hawkins
#13. instead a different sort of joy, a little girl tucked up between him and his wife, babbling away. She'll be just learning to talk now, all "Dada" and "Mama" and a secret language incomprehensible to anyone but a parent.
Paula Hawkins
#14. She has her fingers curled tightly around his forefinger and I have hold of her perfect pink foot, and I feel as though fireworks are going off in my chest. It's impossible, this much love.
Paula Hawkins
#15. 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.
Paula Hawkins
#16. When did you become so weak?" I don't know. I don't know where that strength went, I don't remember losing it. I think that over time it got chipped away, bit by bit, by life, by the living of it.
Paula Hawkins
#17. ...the past shooting out at me like sparrows for the hedgerow, startling and inescapable.
Paula Hawkins
#18. Every time I think I'm about to seize the moment, it drifts back into the shadows, just beyond my reach.
Paula Hawkins
#19. Having something commissioned made it easier for me to share my work and see it out there and have people read it without feeling like there was a piece of my soul on the page.
Paula Hawkins
#20. she finds it funny or whether she's trying to appease him.
Paula Hawkins
#21. It's transference, Megan," he said. "It happens from time to time. It happens to me, too. I really should have introduced this topic last time. I'm sorry." I
Paula Hawkins
#23. I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head.
Paula Hawkins
#24. because if you want someone badly enough, morals (and certainly professionalism) don't come into it. You'll do anything to have them. He just doesn't want me badly enough.
Paula Hawkins
#25. No matter how much I love him, it won't be enough.
Paula Hawkins
#26. I'm well aware there is no job more important than that of raising a child, but the problem is that it isn't valued. Not in the sense that counts to me at the moment, which is financial.
Paula Hawkins
#27. The train stops at the signal as usual. I can see Jess standing on the patio in front of the French doors. She's wearing a bright print dress, her feet are bare.
Paula Hawkins
#29. 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
#31. I'm a good liar," he told me once with a grin. Once, he said, "Even if she did check, the thing with Rachel is, she won't remember what happened tomorrow anyway." That's when I started to realize just how bad things were for him. It
Paula Hawkins
#32. I've always thought that it might be fun to be Catholic, to be able to go to the confessional and unburden yourself and have someone tell you that they forgive you, to take all the sin away, wipe the slate clean.
Paula Hawkins
#34. She made a mistake. It happens. We are none of us perfect.
Paula Hawkins
#35. It comes from shared experience, from knowing how it feels to be broken. Hollowness: that I understand.
Paula Hawkins
#36. He's taken a shower, washed me off his skin. He looks better for it, but he won't look me in the eye when he asks if I'd like a coffee. This isn't what I wanted: none of this is right. I don't want to do this. I don't want to lose control again.
Paula Hawkins
#37. I spent a lot of time writing about tax and pensions and mortgages.
Paula Hawkins
#38. That's what he always used to say to me. Don't expect me to be sane, Anna. Not with you.
Paula Hawkins
#39. I lay there and I thought of what that teacher said, and of all the things I'd been: child, rebellious teenager, runaway, whore, lover, bad mother, bad wife. I'm not sure if I can remake myself as a good wife, but a good mother - that I have to try.
Paula Hawkins
#41. He finishes his beer and rolls the empty bottle across the table. With a sad shake of his head, he gets to his feet, comes over to me and holds out his hands. "Come on," he says. "Grab hold. Come on, Rach, up you
Paula Hawkins
#42. The train stops. We are almost opposite Jess and Jason's house, but I can't see across the carriage and the tracks, there are too many people in the way. I wonder whether they are there, whether he knows, whether he's left, or whether he's still living a life he's yet to discover is a lie.
Paula Hawkins
#43. The police think I'm a rubbernecker. They think I'm a stalker, a nut-case, mentally unstable.
Paula Hawkins
#44. Scott the other night: the dream was just my brain picking all that apart.
Paula Hawkins
#45. He's a master at it, making me feel as though everything is my fault, making me feel worthless.
Paula Hawkins
#46. 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
#47. Sometimes I catch myself trying to remember the last time I had meaningful physical contact with another person, just a hug or a heartfelt squeeze of my hand, and my heart twitches.
Paula Hawkins
#48. It's nice being out early, before the school run, before the commute gets going; the streets are empty and clean, the day full of possibility
Paula Hawkins
#49. It's still warm; there are clouds of midges under the trees and the sunshine is streaming through the leaves, bathing the path in an oddly subterranean light. Above our heads, magpies chatter angrily.
Paula Hawkins
#50. I am interested, for the first time in ages, in something other than my own misery. I have purpose. Or at least, I have a distraction. THURSDAY, JULY 18, 2013
Paula Hawkins
#51. the job itself is utterly beneath me, but then I seem to have become beneath me over the past year or two. I need to reset the scale.
Paula Hawkins
#52. I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts.
Paula Hawkins
#53. the sense of shame I feel about an incident is proportionate not just to the gravity of the situation, but also to the number of people who witnessed it. At
Paula Hawkins
#54. It's ridiculous, when I think about it. How did I find myself here? I wonder where it started, my decline; I wonder at what point I could have halted it. Where did I take the wrong turn?
Paula Hawkins
#55. Lena's voice grew cold. "I don't understand you. I don't understand people like you, who always choose to blame the woman. If there's two people doing something wrong and one of them's a girl, it's got to be her fault, right?
Paula Hawkins
#56. I have to find a way of making myself happy, I have to stop looking for happiness elsewhere. It's true,
Paula Hawkins
#57. There are familiar faces on these trains, people I see every week, going to and fro. I recognize them and they probably recognize me.
Paula Hawkins
#59. There was a time when I thought he could be everything, he could be enough. I thought that for years. I loved him completely. I still do. But I don't want this any longer.
Paula Hawkins
#60. green and cold and waiting for fingers of sunshine to creep up from the tracks and make them all come alive.
Paula Hawkins
#61. I want to drag knives over my skin, just to feel something other than shame, but I'm not even brave enough for that
Paula Hawkins
#63. 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
#64. Usually, I would pretend to be nice, but this morning I feel real, like myself. I feel high, almost like I'm tripping, and I couldn't fake nice if I tried.
Paula Hawkins
#65. I can't sleep. I haven't slept in days. I hate this, hate insomnia more than anything, just lying there, brain going round, tick, tick, tick, tick. I itch all over. I want to shave my head.
Paula Hawkins
#66. It must take the most incredible self-control, that stillness, that passivity; it must be exhausting.
Paula Hawkins
#67. And I've just got to let myself feel the pain, because if I don't, if I keep numbing it, it'll never really go away.
Paula Hawkins
#68. They're what I lost, they're everything I want to be.
Paula Hawkins
#69. If you want someone badly enough, you'll do anything to have them.
Paula Hawkins
#70. I didn't want to draw attention to her resting place, but I couldn't leave her without remembrance.
Paula Hawkins
#71. I just don't know whether he's the condemned man or the executioner.
Paula Hawkins
#72. The thing about being barren is that you're not allowed to get away from it.
Paula Hawkins
#73. I know is, one minute I'm ticking along fine and life is sweet and I want for nothing, and the next I can't wait to get away, I'm all over the place, slipping and sliding again.
Paula Hawkins
#74. Obviously, my name is known now, but I don't think people generally tend to recognize authors very much. People like J. K. Rowling maybe, Gillian Flynn might be recognized, but I reckon she could walk by me on the street, and I wouldn't know who she was.
Paula Hawkins
#75. He follows me and I take off my clothes as I'm going up the stairs, and when we get there, when he pushes me down on the bed, I'm not even thinking about him, but it doesn't matter because he doesn't know that. I'm good enough to make him believe that it's all about him.
Paula Hawkins
#76. Sometimes I feel like seeing if I can track down anybody from the old days, but then I think, what would I talk to them about now? They wouldn't even recognize Megan the happily married suburbanite. In any case, I can't risk looking backwards, it's always a bad idea.
Paula Hawkins
#77. Nothing at all would be a step up from my conversations with Anna. God, she's dull! You get the feeling that she probably had something to say for herself once upon a time, but now everything is about the child: Is she warm enough? Is she too warm? How much milk did she take?
Paula Hawkins
#78. He closed his eyes so that he didn't have to watch me choke.
Paula Hawkins
#80. I wrote four novels under the name Amy Silver. The first one was commissioned, and I was given basically the whole plot and the characters. They told me what to do, and I went straight away and did it. After that, I continued, and I was coming up with more my own ideas, although they did steer me.
Paula Hawkins
#81. Parents don't care anything but their children. They are the centre of the universe; they are all that really counts. Nobody else is important, no one else's suffering or joy matters, none of it is real.
Paula Hawkins
#82. ...that's the point, you can say anything to strangers. But that isn't completely true. You can't just say 'anything'.
Paula Hawkins
#83. I'm almost at the station, just passing the Crown, when I feel a hand on my arm and I wheel around, slipping off the pavement and into the road.
Paula Hawkins
#84. Surely he would call me, wouldn't she? She would know how panicked...how desperate I would be. She's not vindictive like that, is she?
Paula Hawkins
#85. What does it feel like, Anna, to live in my house, surrounded by the furniture I bought, to sleep in the bed that I shared with him for years, to feed your child at the kitchen table he fucked me on?
Paula Hawkins
#87. Sometimes, I don't want to go anywhere, I think I'll be happy if I never have to set foot outside the house again.
Paula Hawkins
#88. I felt dizzy, as though I were having an out-of-body experience, as though I were looking out at myself
Paula Hawkins
#89. If I sit in carriage D, which I usually do, and the train stops at this signal, which it almost always does, I have a perfect view into my favourite trackside house: number fifteen.
Paula Hawkins
#90. I want to say something to him, but the words keep evaporating, vanishing off my tongue before I have the chance to say them. I can taste them, but I can't tell if they are sweet or sour.
Paula Hawkins
#91. The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps.
Paula Hawkins
#92. Who was it said that following your heart is a good thing? It is pure egotism, a selfishness to conquer all.
Paula Hawkins
#93. It actually wasn't about her child at all, although the fact that the child never stops whinging did make her hard to love.
Paula Hawkins
#94. She has no past, no future. She exists purely in the moment. Drunk
Paula Hawkins
#95. To have my hopes raised and dashed again, it's like cold steel twisting in my gut.
Paula Hawkins
#96. At parties, he often holds her hand, even though they've been together years. They respect each other, they don't put each other down.
Paula Hawkins
#98. It isn't normal to invade someone's privacy to that degree. It's what is often seen as a form of emotional abuse.
Paula Hawkins
#99. It feels like coming home - not just to any home, but a childhood home, a place left behind a lifetime ago; it's the familiarity of walking up stairs and knowing exactly which one is going to creak.
Paula Hawkins
#100. In the early days, I used to see him all the time. Like, in the street, or I'd see a man in a bar and be
so sure it was him that my heart would start racing. I used to hear his voice in crowds. But that stopped,
a long time ago. Now, I think he might be dead.
Paula Hawkins
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