Top 100 Paula Hawkins Quotes
#4. 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
#5. That's what he always used to say to me. Don't expect me to be sane, Anna. Not with you.
Paula Hawkins
#6. Hollowness: that I understand. I'm starting to believe that there isn't anything you can do to fix it. That's what I've taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mold yourself through the gaps
Paula Hawkins
#7. When I write, I imagine places more than people.
Paula Hawkins
#8. I spent a lot of time writing about tax and pensions and mortgages.
Paula Hawkins
#9. 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
#10. It comes from shared experience, from knowing how it feels to be broken. Hollowness: that I understand.
Paula Hawkins
#11. She made a mistake. It happens. We are none of us perfect.
Paula Hawkins
#12. I liked my job, but I didn't have a glittering career, and even if I had, let's be honest: women are still only really valued for two things - their looks and their role as mothers. I'm not beautiful, and I can't have kids, so what does that make me? Worthless.
Paula Hawkins
#13. I am single and without children. I'm actually one of those people who's just never had a great desire to have kids.
Paula Hawkins
#14. 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
#16. I'm playing at real life instead of actually living it.
Paula Hawkins
#17. 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
#18. I'm going to tell the truth. No more lies, no more hiding, no more running, no more bullshit. I'm going to put everything out in the open, and then we'll see. If he can't love me then, so be it.
Paula Hawkins
#19. I find writing the darker side, writing tragedy, a lot easier than writing happiness. Happiness is just less psychologically compelling, isn't it?
Paula Hawkins
#20. You can do fascinating things with the tricks memory can play and tell. People can come to believe things which didn't happen at all if they're told them enough times.
Paula Hawkins
#21. 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
#22. It's impossible to resist the kindness of strangers.
Paula Hawkins
#23. That, at least, is true. He hasn't replied. I didn't expect him to. I am cut off from him, shut out. The things
Paula Hawkins
#24. Tom said about Scott and Megan came from Anna, and no one knows better than I do that she can't be trusted.
Paula Hawkins
#26. On the train, the tears come, and I don't care if people are watching me; for all they know, my dog might have been run over. I might have been diagnosed with a terminal illness. I might be a barren, divorced, soon-to-be-homeless alcoholic.
Paula Hawkins
#27. 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
#28. Then I wait. Times and dates, mostly. Not dates. Days. Monday
Paula Hawkins
#29. I had every right to be angry, didn't I? We were trying to have a baby - shouldn't we have been prepared to make sacrifices? I would have cut off a limb if it meant I could have had a child. Couldn't he have forgone a weekend in Vegas?
Paula Hawkins
#30. My idea of fun is to sit looking at a blank wall in a cottage, making up stories in utter silence. The thought of going back to work in an office is horrendous.
Paula Hawkins
#31. 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
#32. There can be no greater agony, nothing can be more painful than the not knowing, which will never end.
Paula Hawkins
#33. 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
#34. I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts.
Paula Hawkins
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. He's a master at it, making me feel as though everything is my fault, making me feel worthless.
Paula Hawkins
#43. LIFE IS NOT A PARAGRAPH. I think about the bundle of clothes on the side of the track and I feel as though my throat is closing up. Life is not a paragraph, and death is no parenthesis. EVENING
Paula Hawkins
#44. I felt isolated in my misery. I became lonely, so I drank a bit, and then a bit more, and then I became lonelier, because no one likes being around a drunk. I lost and I drank and I drank and I lost.
Paula Hawkins
#45. Nobody warned me it would break us. But it did. Or rather, it broke me, and then I broke us. The
Paula Hawkins
#46. Scott the other night: the dream was just my brain picking all that apart.
Paula Hawkins
#47. The police think I'm a rubbernecker. They think I'm a stalker, a nut-case, mentally unstable.
Paula Hawkins
#48. I can't reply because my mind has gone somewhere else entirely, and it's not
Paula Hawkins
#49. 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
#50. 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. The
Paula Hawkins
#51. But I did become sadder, and sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for everyone around them.
Paula Hawkins
#52. This shouldn't matter, but it does: 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.
Paula Hawkins
#53. 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
#54. Every time I think I'm about to seize the moment, it drifts back into the shadows, just beyond my reach.
Paula Hawkins
#55. ...the past shooting out at me like sparrows for the hedgerow, startling and inescapable.
Paula Hawkins
#56. 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
#57. I can't bear to look at it. Well I can, I do, I want to, I don't want to, I try not to. Every day I tell myself not to look, and every day I look. I can't help myself, even though there is nothing I want to see there, even though anything I do see will hurt me.
Paula Hawkins
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. The memory doesn't fit with the reality, because I don't remember anger, raging fury. I remember fear.
Paula Hawkins
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. I snap the laptop shut and jump to my feet, knocking my
Paula Hawkins
#66. He is watching me, waiting for me to say something, to
Paula Hawkins
#67. let's be honest: women are still only really valued for two things - their looks and their role as mothers.
Paula Hawkins
#68. I once read a book by a former alcoholic where she described giving oral sex to two different men, men she'd just met in a restaurant on a busy London high street. I read it and thought, I'm not that bad. This is where the bar is set.
Paula Hawkins
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Beware a calm surface - you never know what lies beneath.
Paula Hawkins
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. It doesn't feel like it was me who was doing that thing. And it's so hard to feel responsible for something you don't remember. So I never feel bad enough. I feel bad, but the thing that I've done - it's removed from me. It's like it doesn't belong to me.
Paula Hawkins
#76. I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head.
Paula Hawkins
#78. When I'm writing, I don't read much crime at all - you don't want to get distracted by other people's plots.
Paula Hawkins
#79. I just listen. Sitting here in the morning, eyes closed
Paula Hawkins
#80. Tom's whole life was constructed on lies - falsehoods and half-truths told to make him look better, stronger, more interesting than he was.
Paula Hawkins
#81. 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
#82. Once I've made my mind up, I'm a force to be reckoned with.
Paula Hawkins
#83. 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
#84. No matter how much I love him, it won't be enough.
Paula Hawkins
#85. 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
#86. I don't believe in soul mates, but there's an understanding between us that I just haven't felt before, or at least, not for a long time. It comes from shared experience, from knowing how it feels to be broken.
Paula Hawkins
#87. I need to find something that I must do, something undeniable.
Paula Hawkins
#88. He'll be so happy. He'll be mental with joy when I tell him. The thought that she might not be his won't even cross his mind. Telling him would be cruel, it would break his heart, and I don't want to hurt him. I've never wanted to hurt him. I can't help the way I am.
Paula Hawkins
#89. 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
#90. Every time I hear footsteps on the steps, my heart rate goes up. Every time I hear the clacking of high heels, I am seized with trepidation.
Paula Hawkins
#91. I was kind of broke . 'The Girl on the Train' was a last roll of the dice for me as a fiction writer.
Paula Hawkins
#93. But it's not so bad, I can think of worse traits in a flatmate. No, it's not Cathy, it's not even Ashbury that bothers me most about my new situation (I still think of it as new, although it's been two years). It's the loss of control.
Paula Hawkins
#95. I've been the fool. If he does it with you, he'll do it to you.
Paula Hawkins
#96. Anything was possible. When you hear hooves you look for horses, but you can't discount zebras.
Paula Hawkins
#97. 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
#98. she finds it funny or whether she's trying to appease him.
Paula Hawkins
#99. I can't do this, I can't just be a wife. I don't understand how anyone does it - there is literally nothing to do but wait. Wait for a man to come home and love you. Either that or look around for something to distract you.
Paula Hawkins
#100. know what it is to love someone and to say the most terrible things to them, in anger or anguish.
Paula Hawkins
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
