Paula Hawkins Quotes

...the past shooting out at me like sparrows for the hedgerow, startling and inescapable.

She made a mistake. It happens. We are none of us perfect.

You're like one of those dogs, the unwanted ones that have been mistreated all their lives. You can kick them and kick them, but they'll still come back to you, cringing and wagging their tails. Begging. Hoping that this time it'll be different, that this time they'll do something right and you'll love them.

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.

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.

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.

Now, I think he might be dead.

'The Woman on the Train' just didn't sound as good. I'll take care next time not to have 'girl' in the title.

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

It isn't normal to invade someone's privacy to that degree. It's what is often seen as a form of emotional abuse.

When I write, I imagine places more than people.

The things I want to remember I can't, and the things I try so hard to forget just keep coming.

It broke me and I broke us.

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.

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.

I find writing the darker side, writing tragedy, a lot easier than writing happiness. Happiness is just less psychologically compelling, isn't it?

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?

She's cuckoo, laying her egg in my nest.

If you want someone badly enough, you'll do anything to have them.

The memory doesn't fit with the reality, because I don't remember anger, raging fury. I remember fear.

You take care of yourself, Rachel," she said, and there was something about the way she said it that made it feel like a warning. We are tied together, forever bound by the stories we told.

It's impossible to resist the kindness of strangers.

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

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.

I'm not naturally an extrovert. I'm a writer - I sit in a room by myself making things up. That is where I'm happiest.

Women become invisible as they age; men become impotent.

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.

He might be a very good liar, but I know when he's telling the truth. He doesn't fool me.

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.

To have my hopes raised and dashed again, it's like cold steel twisting in my gut.

It's a glorious evening, warm but not too close, the sun starting its lazy descent, shadows lengthening and the light just beginning to burnish the trees with gold.

know what it is to love someone and to say the most terrible things to them, in anger or anguish.

I'd never realized, not until the last year or two of my life, how shaming it is to be pitied.

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

I am not the girl I used to be. I am no longer desirable, I'm off-putting in some way. It's not just that I've put on weight, or that my face is puffy from the drinking and the lack of sleep; it's as if people can see the damage written all over me, can see it in my face, the way I hold myself, the way I move.

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?

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.

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.

Now look what you made me do.

Scott the other night: the dream was just my brain picking all that apart.

those dogs, the unwanted ones that have been mistreated all their lives. You can kick them and kick them, but they'll still come back to you, cringing and wagging their tails. Begging. Hoping

Nobody warned me it would break us. But it did. Or rather, it broke me, and then I broke us. The

That's my fault, of course, because I behaved stupidly, like a child, because I didn't like feeling rejected. I need to learn to lose a little better.

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.

If I can just learn how to hold on to this feeling, this one I'm having now - if I could just discover how to focus on this happiness, enjoy the moment, not wonder about where the next high is coming from - then everything will be all right.

It was written by a doctor, but I've no idea whether it was accurate: the author claimed that blacking out wasn't simply a matter of forgetting what happened, but having no memories to forget in the first place. His theory was that you get into a state where you no longer make short term memories. And while you're there, in deepest black, you don't behave as you usually would, because you're simply reacting to the very last thing you think happened, because---since you aren't making memories---you might not actually know what the last thing to happen really was.

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.

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?

Some battles aren't worth fighting

But the thing people don't seem to realize is that I don't want to not feel like this. How can I not feel like this? My sadness feels right. It … weighs the right amount, crushes me just enough.

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

I want to drag knives over my skin, just to feel something other than shame, but I'm not even brave enough for that

Mac saved me. He took me in, he loved me, he kept me safe. And he wasn't boring. And to be perfectly honest, we were taking a lot of drugs, and it's difficult to get bored when you're off your face all the time. I was happy.

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.

There's something covering my face, I can't breathe, I'm suffocating. When I surface into wakefulness, I'm gasping for air and my chest hurts. I sit up, eyes wide, and see something moving in the corner of the room, a dense centre of blackness that keeps growing, and I almost cry out - and then I'm properly awake and there's nothing there, but I am sitting up in bed and my cheeks are wet with tears.

I realized I do tragedy better than comedy.

I just listen. Sitting here in the morning, eyes closed

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.

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.

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.

I can't reply because my mind has gone somewhere else entirely, and it's not

The thing about being barren is that you're not allowed to get away from it.

The police think I'm a rubbernecker. They think I'm a stalker, a nut-case, mentally unstable.

He lies to himself the way he lies to me. He believes this. He actually believes that he was good to me.

In between them stood an elephant and she felt she ought to point it out.

And I can't help thinking, I knew. I always knew there was something off
about that woman. At first I just thought she was a bit immature, but it was more than that, she was sort
of absent. Self-involved. I'm not going to lie - I'm glad she's gone. Good riddance.

I feel like myself - the myself I used to be.

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?

But I did become sadder, and sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for everyone around them.

Sometimes I want to scream at him, Just let me go. Let me go. Let me breathe. So I can't sleep, and I'm angry. I feel as though we're having fight already, even though the fight's only in my imagination. And in my head, thoughts go round and round and round. And I feel like I'm suffocating.

My legs are still trembling as I climb the steps to Corly station. I've been shaking like this for hours, it must be the adrenaline, my heart just won't slow down. The train is packed - no chance of a seat here, it's not like getting on at Euston, so I have to stand, midway through a carriage. It's like a sweatbox. I'm trying to breathe slowly, my eyes cast down to my feet. I'm just trying to get a handle on what I'm feeling. Exultation, fear, confusion and guilt. Mostly guilt.

If he thinks I'm going to sit around crying over him, he's got another thing coming. I can live without him, I can do without him just fine - but I don't like to lose. It's not like me. None of this is like me. I don't get rejected. I'm the one who walks away.

He closed his eyes so that he didn't have to watch me choke.

After Tom leaves for work, I take Evie to the park, we play on the swings and the little wooden rocking horses, and when I put her back into her buggy she falls asleep almost immediately, which is my cue to go shopping. We cut through the back streets towards the big Sainsbury's. It's a bit of a roundabout way of getting there, but it's quiet, with very little traffic, and in any case we get to pass number thirty-four Cranham Road. It gives me a little frisson even now, walking past that house - butterflies suddenly swarm in my stomach, and a smile comes to my lips and colour to my cheeks. I remember hurrying up the front steps, hoping none of the neighbours would see me letting myself in, getting myself ready in the bathroom, putting on perfume, the kind of underwear you put on just to be taken off. Then I'd get a text message and he'd be at the door, and we'd have an hour or two in the bedroom upstairs.

Maybe that was the moment when things started to go wrong, the moment when I imagined us no longer a couple, but a family; and after that, once I had that picture in my head, just the two of us could never be enough.

I am interested in the ordinary sort of threat. I know that people are interested in things like serial killers and what have you, but actually, those aren't the sort of crimes that really happen very much. The sort of crimes that happen tend to be more of a domestic nature and quite banal, but the psychology behind them is always fascinating.

Who was it said that following your heart is a good thing? It is pure egotism, a selfishness to conquer all.

it's possible to miss what you've never had, to mourn for it.

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.

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.

I snap the laptop shut and jump to my feet, knocking my

One more day of drinking, perhaps, and then I'll get myself straight tomorrow.

Cathy gets up early to clean the house every Saturday, no matter what. It could be her birthday, it could be the morning of the Rapture - Cathy will get up early on Saturday to clean. She says it's cathartic, it sets her up for a good weekend, and because she cleans the house aerobically, it means she doesn't have to go to the gym.

It must take the most incredible self-control, that stillness, that passivity; it must be exhausting.

I just don't know whether he's the condemned man or the executioner.

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.

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.

I've been the fool. If he does it with you, he'll do it to you.

The last thing I need is rest.

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.

When I'm writing, I don't read much crime at all - you don't want to get distracted by other people's plots.

I had a teacher at school who told me once that I was a mistress of self-reinvention. I didn't know what he was on about at the time, I thought he was putting me on, but I've since come to like the idea. Runaway, lover, wife, waitress, gallery manager, nanny, and a few more in between. So who do I want to be tomorrow?

I can't do this, I can't just be a wife.

It comes from shared experience, from knowing how it feels to be broken. Hollowness: that I understand.

They're what I lost, they're everything I want to be.

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.

She felt it when she woke, not a presence but an absence.

He is watching me, waiting for me to say something, to

The journalism, I was a financial journalist - it's very good training as a writer. You have to write for deadlines; you have a certain economy of phrasing. As a training ground as a writer, it's fantastic. I also think it teaches you to be observant, to listen to people, and gives you an ear of dialogue from doing interviews.

Life is not a paragraph, and death is no parenthesis.

(This is a reference to an E.E. Cummings poem within the author's work)