Paula Hawkins Quotes

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

I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts.

There’s something comforting about the sight of strangers safe at home.

I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head.

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

The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps.

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)

There’s nothing so painful, so corrosive, as suspicion.

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.

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

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

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.

let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things—their looks and their role as mothers.

I’m playing at real life instead of actually living it.

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.

A tiding of magpies: One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told

It's impossible to resist the kindness of strangers.

Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.

I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts. Who was it said that following your heart is a good thing? It is pure egotism, a selfishness to conquer all.

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.

I have to find a way of making myself happy, I have to stop looking for happiness elsewhere. It’s true,

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.

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?

He’s a master at it, making me feel as though everything is my fault, making me feel worthless.

It’s impossible to resist the kindness of strangers. Someone who looks at you, who doesn’t know you, who tells you it’s OK, whatever you did, whatever you’ve done: you suffered, you hurt, you deserve forgiveness.

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.

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

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

Beautiful sunshine, cloudless skies, no one to play with, nothing to do. Living like this, the way I’m living at the moment, is harder in the summer when there is so much daylight, so little cover of darkness, when everyone is out and about, being flagrantly, aggressively happy. It’s exhausting, and it makes you feel bad if you’re not joining in.

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

It broke me and I broke us.

He never understood that it’s possible to miss what you’ve never had, to mourn for it.

It’s not even rejection, it’s dismissal.

How much better life must have been for jealous drunks before emails and texts and mobile phones, before all this electronica and the traces it leaves.

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.

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

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

Who's to say that once I run, I'll find that isn't enough? Who's to say I won't end up feeling exactly the way I do right now-not safe, but stifled? Maybe I'll want to run again, and again, and eventually I'll end up back on those old tracks, because there's nowhere left to go. Maybe. Maybe not. You have to take the risk, don't you

So who do I want to be tomorrow?

Being the other woman is a huge turn-on, there’s no point denying it: you’re the one he can’t help but betray his wife for, even though he loves her. That’s just how irresistible you are.

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

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.

No matter how much I love him, it won't be enough.

Yes, it is. It’s, like, when someone has an affair, why does the wife always hate the other woman? Why doesn’t she hate her husband? He’s the one who’s betrayed her, he’s the one who swore to love her and keep her and whatever forever and ever. Why isn’t he the one who gets shoved off a fucking cliff?

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.

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.

He doesn’t know how determined I can be. Once I’ve made my mind up, I’m a force to be reckoned with.

One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl . . . Three for a girl. I’m stuck on three, I just can’t get any further. My head is thick with sounds, my mouth thick with blood. Three for a girl. I can hear the magpies—they’re laughing, mocking me, a raucous cackling. A tiding. Bad tidings. I can see them now, black against the sun. Not the birds, something else. Someone’s coming. Someone is speaking to me. Now look. Now look what you made me do.

I feel a rush of gratitude so strong, it feels almost like love.

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

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

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.

I wake abruptly, my breath jagged and heart racing, my mouth stale, and I know immediately that's it. I'm awake. The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.

here will be no closure, no resolution. I lie awake thinking about it and I ache. There can be no greater agony, nothing can be more painful than the not knowing, which will never end.

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.

I might never have the courage to say the words out loud, I might lose them altogether, they might stick in my throat and choke me in my sleep.

She had never realized before her life was torn apart how awkward grief was, how inconvenient for everyone with whom the mourner came into contact. At first it was acknowledged and respected and deferred to. But after a while it got in the way—of conversation, of laughter, of normal life.

A familiar ache fills my chest. I have felt this way before. On a larger scale, to a more intense degree, of course, but I remember the quality of the pain. You don’t forget it.

The horrors conjured up by the mind are always so much worse than what is.

No one liked to think about the fact that the water in that river was infected with the blood and bile of persecuted women, unhappy women; they drank it every day.

Anything was possible. When you hear hooves you look for horses, but you can’t discount zebras.

He loves me so much, it makes me ache. I don’t know how he does it. I would drive me mad.

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?

لا يمكن أن يوجد عذاب أكبر، أو شيء أكثر إيلاماً، من عدم المعرفة

Imagine walking past the place where you lost someone, every single day.

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

We tell our stories differently, don't we, you and I?

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.

You’re not some grieving, lost child any longer. You’re a completely different person. You’re stronger. You’re an adult now. You don’t have to be afraid of being alone. It’s not the worst thing, is it?

أحس أنني صرت أخف ، أكثر حرية ، لكن أكثر حزنًا أيضًا

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?

She must be very secure in herself, I suppose, in them, for it not to bother her, to walk where another woman has walked before. She obviously doesn’t think of me as a threat. I think about Ted Hughes, moving Assia Wevill into the home he’d shared with Plath, of her wearing Sylvia’s clothes, brushing her hair with the same brush. I want to ring Anna up and remind her that Assia ended up with her head in the oven, just like Sylvia did.

some battles aren’t worth fighting.

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

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.

Maybe the courage I need has nothing to do with telling the truth and everything to do with walking away.

The river can go back over the past and bring it all up and spit it out on the banks in full view of everyone, but people can’t.

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?

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.

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

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 not normal.

Beckford is not a suicide spot. Beckford is a place to get rid of troublesome women.

I sit there on the floor with the picture in front of me and think about how things get broken all the time by accident, and how sometimes you just don't get round to getting them fixed.

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.

The last thing I need is rest.

I am no longer just a girl on the train, going back and forth without point or purpose.

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

ليس عليّ إلا أن أترك نفسي أحس هذا الألم، لأنني إذا لم أفعل ذلك ... إذا بقيت أخدّر الألم ... فلن يزول مني أبداً

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.

You were never the princess, you were never the passive beauty waiting for a prince, you were something else. You sided with darkness, with the wicked stepmother, the bad fairy, the witch.

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. 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 mould yourself through the gaps.

Cathy's a nice person, in a forceful sort of way. She makes you notice her niceness. Her niceness is writ large, it is her defining quality and she needs it acknowledged, often, daily almost, which can be tiring.

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.

She’s buried beneath a silver birch tree, down towards the old train tracks, her grave marked with a cairn. Not more than a little pile of stones, really. I didn’t want to draw attention to her resting place, but I couldn’t leave her without remembrance. She’ll sleep peacefully there, no one to disturb her, no sounds but birdsong and the rumble of passing trains.

And they are a partnership. I can see it, I know how they are. His strength, that protectiveness he radiates, it doesn’t mean she’s weak. She’s strong in other ways; she makes intellectual leaps that leave him openmouthed in admiration. She can cut to the nub of a problem, dissect and analyse it in the time it takes other people to say good morning. 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.

But I have to do something, and at least this feels like action. All those plans I had—photography courses and cookery classes—when it comes down to it, they feel a bit pointless, as if I’m playing at real life instead of actually living it. I need to find something that I must do, something undeniable. 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.

In no time at all, I find myself crying again. It’s impossible to resist the kindness of strangers. Someone who looks at you, who doesn’t know you, who tells you it’s OK, whatever you did, whatever you’ve done: you suffered, you hurt, you deserve forgiveness. I confide in him and I forget, once again, what I’m doing here. I don’t watch his face for a reaction, I don’t study his eyes for some sign of guilt or suspicion. I let him comfort me.

The thing about being barren is that you’re not allowed to get away from it. Not when you’re in your thirties. My friends were having children, friends of friends were having children, pregnancy and birth and first birthday parties were everywhere. I was asked about it all the time. My mother, our friends, colleagues at work. When was it going to be my turn? At some point our childlessness became an acceptable topic of Sunday-lunch conversation, not just between Tom and me, but more generally. What we were trying, what we should be doing, do you really think you should be having a second glass of wine? I was still young, there was still plenty of time, but failure cloaked me like a mantle, it overwhelmed me, dragged me under, and I gave up hope. At the time, I resented the fact that it was always seen as my fault, that I was the one letting the side down. But as the speed with which he managed to impregnate Anna demonstrates, there was never any problem with Tom’s virility. I was wrong to suggest that we should share the blame; it was all down to me. Lara, my best friend since university, had two children in two years: a boy first and then a girl. I didn’t like them. I didn’t want to hear anything about them. I didn’t want to be near them. Lara stopped speaking to me after a while. There was a girl at work who told me—casually, as though she were talking about an appendectomy or a wisdom-tooth extraction—that she’d recently had an abortion, a medical one, and it was so much less traumatic than the surgical one she’d had when she was at university. I couldn’t speak to her after that, I could barely look at her. Things became awkward in the office; people noticed. Tom didn’t feel the way I did. It wasn’t his failure, for starters, and in any case, he didn’t need a child like I did. He wanted to be a dad, he really did—I’m sure he daydreamed about kicking a football around in the garden with his son, or carrying his daughter on his shoulders in the park. But he thought our lives could be great without children, too. “We’re happy,” he used to say to me. “Why can’t we just go on being happy?” He became frustrated with me. He never understood that it’s possible to miss what you’ve never had, to mourn for it.