Ruth Ware Quotes

All I saw were flaws- the spots on my chin, the hint of baby fat around the jaw, the way my unruly flyaway hair wisped out from the elastic band.

"Look," he said. "The reason it's not coming together is because you're drawing the features, not the person. You're more than a collection of frown lines and doubts. The person I see when I look at you..." He stopped and I waited, feeling his eyes on me, trying not to squirm beneath the intensity of his gaze. "I see someone brave," he said at last. "I see someone who's trying very hard. I see someone who's nervous, but stronger than she knows. I see someone who's worried but doesn't need to be."

"Draw that." " Draw the person I see.

There are no other runners in my family Dash or not that I know of – but my grandmother was a walker. She said that when she was a girl and in a rage with a friend, she used to write her friends name on the soles of her feet in shock, and walk until then he was gone. She said by the time the truck was one away, resentment what is seated, too.

I remember the mantra of visitors when she was a newborn - sleep when the baby sleeps! And I wanted to laugh. I wanted to say, Don't you get it? I can't ever sleep again, not completely. Not into that complete, solid unconsciousness I used to have before she came along...
...Anything could happen- she could choke in her sleep, the house could burn down, a fox could slink into the open bathroom window and maul her. And so I sleep with one ear cocked, ready to leap up, heart pounding, at the least sign that something is wrong.

Was this what it was going to be like? Was I turning into someone who had panic attacks about walking home from the tube or staying the night alone in the house without their boyfriend?
No, fuck that. I would not be that person.

It was... I don't know. I don't know how to put it. It was pride, I think. A kind of disbelief at my own stupidity. The thought that I'd loved him so much, and had been so mistaken. How could I? How could I have been so incredibly, unbelievably wrong?

I jumped to a conclusion that was so wrong, it was almost completely right.

The night was drawing in, and the house felt more and more like a glass cage, blasting its light blindly out into the dusk, like a lantern in the dark. I imagined a thousand moths circling and shivering, drawn inexorably to its glow, only to perish against the cold inhospitable glass.

But it must be nice working with other people." I ventured. "Sharing the responsibility, I mean. A play's a big thing, right?" "Yes, I suppose so. You have to share the glory, but at least when the shit hits the fan, it's a collective splattering, I guess." I

Its size, along with the perfection of its paintwork, gave it a curiously toylike quality, and as I stepped onto the narrow steel gangway I had a sudden disorienting image of the Aurora as a ship imprisoned in a bottle – tiny, perfect, isolated, and unreal – and of myself, shrinking down to match it with every step I took towards the boat.

I am running. I am running through moonlit woods, with branches ripping at my clothes and my feet catching in the snow-bowed bracken.

The whole thing had been painful to the point of nausea, made worse by covert sympathetic looks from Nina. 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.

Reading the cards (tarot) was revealing, and not only for the client.

A lie. I'd almost forgotten how they feel on my tongue, slick and sickening.

Was it really possible she was dead?
But the alternative was not much better. Because if she wasn't, the only other possibility - and suddenly I wasn't sure if it was better or worse - was that I was going mad.

Look, it's her faith, all right? There's no need to be offensive."

"I'm not being offensive. You cannot, by definition, offend someone who's not here. Offense has to be taken, not just given.

I felt my breath whimper in my throat. I tried to speak, but I was dumb. I tried to move, but I was frozen with fear.
She opened her mouth, and I knew that she was about to speak - but then she reached inside, and pulled out her tongue.

But his grief, the gaping hole left after my mother died- it's too close to my own. Seeing his grief, year after year, it only magnifies my own. My Mother was the glue that held us all together. Now, with her missing, there are only people in pain, unable to heal each other.

STOP DIGGING.' The letters on the mirror were etched in my memory. Now, as I finished my make-up with a swipe of lip-gloss, I huffed on the mirror, and wrote in the steam obscuring my reflection one word: 'NO'.

I would never sleep. I knew that. Not with my blood ringing in my ears, and my heart beating an angry staccato rhythm in my chest. I would never relax.

I love ports. I love the smell of tar and sea air, and the scream of the gulls. Maybe it's years of taking the ferry to France for summer holidays, but a harbor gives me a feeling of freedom in a way that an airport never does. Airports say work and security checks and delays. Ports say... I don't know. Something completely different. Escape, maybe.

It was not exactly a longing to stay here, for Trepassen was too gothic and gloomy to ever feel like a truly welcoming place. It had the sense of a house where people had suffered in silence, where meals had been eaten in tension and fear, where secrets had been concealed, and where unhappiness had reigned more often than contentment.

That's the trouble with having a "click" as Mary Wren might call it. When you define yourself by walls, who's in, who's out. The people on the other side of the wall become, not just them, but them. The outsiders. The opposition. The enemy.

Perhaps it was simply that I'd learned to hide the awkward, desperate-to-fit-in child I had been. Perhaps the me I'd become was just a thin veneer, ready to be peeled painfully back.

there was genuine pity in her face, but also a kind of glee, the sort you see sometimes when teens are interviewed about the tragic death of a friend. The sadness is there, and it's real, but there's an underlying thrill at the drama of it all, the realness of it all.

A lie can outlast any truth.

Very well. May I offer you a glass of champagne?" She indicated a tray on a small table by the entrance, and I nodded and took a frosted flute. I knew I should keep a clear head for tomorrow, but one glass for Dutch courage couldn't hurt

The people who came to her booth were seeking meaning and control – but they were looking in the wrong place. When they gave themselves over to superstition, they were giving up on shaping their own destiny.

I knew what Nilsson wanted. He wanted me to forget what I'd heard, the scream, the stealthy slide of the screen door, and that horrible, huge slithering splash.

i felt my face turn scarlet as if the sun were burning me alive

There are some things you shouldn't have to remember.

Generally, if people write to you, it's because they liked the book, although I have had a few messages telling me what a terrible person I am. But even when they're nice, it's still odd and uncomfortable-someone telling you their reaction to your private thoughts, like reading someone's opinion on your diary. I'm not sure I'll ever get used to that feeling, however long I write.

I always start my morning the same way. Maybe it's something about living alone - you're able to get set in your ways, there's no outside disruptions, no flatmates to hoover up the last of the milk, no cat coughing up a hairball on the rug. You know that what you left in the cupboard the night before will be in the cupboard when you wake up. You're in control. Or

The cards do not predict the future. All thy can do is show us how a given situation may turn out, based on the energies we bring to the reading. Another day, another mood, a different set of energies, and the same question could have a completely different answer....We have free will. The answer the cards give can turn us in our path.

I know what it's like. Don't you see? I know what she must have felt like, when someone came for her in the middle of the night. That's why I have to find out who did this to her.

It confirmed what I already knew. The James Cooper I thought I knew never existed. It was a figment of imagination, a false memory implanted by my own hopes.

If there's one thing I dislike more than being hurt, it's being seen to be hurt.

People do go mad, you know, if you stop them from sleeping for long enough...

Here, in this house the ghosts of our past are real

I wanted to scream. The panic built inside me like a volcano, pressing up through the layers of closed throat and clenched teeth. And then I thought, in a kind of delirium - if I scream, what's the worst that can happen? Someone might hear? Let them hear.