Ruth Ware Quotes

People don’t change,” Nina said bitterly. “They just get more punctilious about hiding their true selves.

A lie can outlast any truth.

My friend Erin says we all have demons inside us, voices that whisper we're no good, that if we don't make this promotion or ace that exam we'll reveal to the world exactly what kind of worthless sacks of skin and sinew we really are Maybe that's true. Maybe mine just have louder voices.

It was growing dark, and somehow the shadows made it feel as if all the trees had taken a collective step towards the house, edging in to shut out the sky.

I always thought that being self-sufficient was a strength, but now I realize it’s a kind of weakness, too.

You’re never an ex-addict, you’re just an addict who hasn’t had a fix in a while.

There’s a reason why we keep thoughts inside our heads for the most part—they’re not safe to be let out in public.

Some situations have no simple resolution; all we can do is steer the course that causes the least harm.

Maybe that was closer to the truth--we weren't captor and captive, but two animals in different compartments of the same cage. Hers was just slightly larger.

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

There was something strangely naked about it, like we were on a stage set, playing our parts to an audience of eyes out there in the wood.

It's not that Nina doesn't feel stuff. She just deals with it differently than most people. Sarcasm is her defense against life.

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

we all have demons inside us, voices that whisper we’re no good, that if we don’t make this promotion or ace that exam we’ll reveal to the world exactly what kind of worthless sacks of skin and sinew we really are.

Because it was the lies that got me here in the first place. And I have to believe that it’s the truth that will get me out.

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

You can’t influence fate, or change what’s out of your control. But you can choose what you yourself do with the cards you’re dealt.

I hate being driven—driving is like karaoke—your own is epic, other people’s is just embarrassing or alarming.

Time healed, they said, but it wasn’t true, or not completely. The first raw wound of loss had closed and silvered over, yes, but the scar it had left would never heal. It would always be there, aching and tender.

A wall, after all, isn’t just about keeping others out. It can also be for trapping people inside.

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.

I know him by heart.

There are days when I don’t hear a single human voice, apart from the radio, and you know what? I quite like that.

There was a little spritz of sequined leaves across the right shoulder because you didn’t seem to be able to get away with none. Apparently the majority of ball gowns were designed by five-year-old girls armed with glitter guns, but at least this one didn’t look entirely like an explosion in a Barbie factory.

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.

The ghosts, she had sobbed. The ghosts wouldn’t like it.

Better to achieve perfect marks on an easy test than flunk a hard one, that was my motto.

How could it be right that some people had so much, while others had so little?

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.

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

In books, a bad thing might happen on page 207, that was true. But it would always happen on page 207, no matter what. And when you reread, you could see it coming, watch out for the signs, prepare yourself.

You’d think people would be wary of spilling to a writer. You’d think they’d know that we’re essentially birds of carrion, picking over the corpses of dead affairs and forgotten arguments to recycle them in our work—zombie reincarnations of their former selves, stitched into a macabre new patchwork of our own devising. Tom,

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.

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

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.

It didn’t help that, unlike a ferry, there were no floor plans or maps, and minimal signage – supposed to help the impression that this was a private home that you just happened to share with a load of rich people.

I wanted to write in my diary—to do as I always do when things get too much—let it out onto the page, like a kind of bloodletting, letting the ink and paper soak up all the grief and anger and fear until I can cope again.

I close my eyes, listening to the sound of the past, imagining myself back into the skin of the girl I once was, a girl whose friends were still around her, whose mistakes were ahead of her......I am happy.

Tina is one of those women who thinks every bit of estrogen in the boardroom is a threat to her own existence.

you’re never alone in a room filled with a thousand books.

Après moi, le déluge. . . .

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

Apparently the majority of ball gowns were designed by five-year-old girls armed with glitter guns, but at least this one didn’t look entirely like an explosion in a Barbie factory. I

Never believe it, Hal. Never believe your own lies. Because superstition was a trap – that was what she had learned, in the years of plying her trade on the pier. Touching wood, crossing fingers, counting magpies – they were all lies, all of them. False promises designed to give the illusion of control and meaning in a world in which the only destiny came from yourself. You can't predict the future, Hal knew.

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.

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.

There is no gray when you’re young. There’s only goodies and baddies, right and wrong. The rules are very clear—a playground morality of ethical lines drawn out like a netball pitch, with clear fouls and penalties.

And it’s a story about hope—about how we have to go on, after the unbearable has happened. Make the most of our lives, for the sake of the people who gave theirs.

So you write plays?” “Yes. I’m always rather jealous of novelists—the way you get to control everything. You don’t have to deal with actors massacring your best lines.

breath

There’s a disappointment in the banality of what makes people tick, but at the same time, there’s a kind of fascination at seeing the inner coils and cogs. The

What was going to happen to me? There were only two possibilities—they were going to let me go at some point. Or they were going to kill me.

Yes. Yes, I take antidepressants. So what? No

Don’t let yourself get caught up in what-ifs. That way madness lies.

And like my dad always used to say, if work was meant to be fun, people wouldn’t pay you to do it.

When they gave themselves over to superstition, they were giving up on shaping their own destiny.

have not spoken to him for ten years, but I thought of him every single day.

To tell the truth we had a bit of a . . . disagreement, let’s call it. Before I left.” “Oh, right.” I kept my voice neutral. I never know what to say in these situations. I hate people prying into my business, so I assume others will feel the same way. But sometimes they want to spill, it seems, and then you look cold and odd, backing away from their confidences. I try to be completely nonjudgmental—not pushing for secrets, not repelling confessions. And in truth, although part of me really doesn’t want to hear their petty jealousies and weird obsessions, there’s another part of me that wants to egg them on. It’s that part of me that stands there nodding, taking notes, filing it all away.

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.

In Topher's world, people are hard, polished shells, their shiny exteriors hiding the inadequacies and anxieties inside. But Topher made a mistake. He didn't understand that some people are the other way around. But Eva . . . I think Eva did understand that. And perhaps it's what killed her in the end.

She didn’t believe in anything mystical, but she did believe in the power of the cards to reveal something about the querent, both to the reader and to the sitter themselves.

She told me children were nothing but padlocks on the patriarchal shackles of marriage. That

For a travel journalist I’m worryingly bad at geography.

Like an idiot I’d taken the bait, exploded on cue. It was done. “I’m

But I was almost certain—almost completely certain—that she was the woman in cabin 10.

So having a routine is important. It gives you something to hang on to, something to differentiate the weekdays from the weekends. My day starts like this. At

And I am thinking about how, however much we struggled to be free, this is how it always ends, the four of us, skewered together by the past.

It’s not just the snow; it’s a hundredweight of unwelcome memories bearing down on me.

Here’s to us,” she said, holding the bottle high, the moonlight striking off the glass. “May we never grow old.

with a feeling like my whole life had been shaken like a snow globe and left to resettle.

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

She had discovered that the most important truths often lay in what people didn’t say, and learned to read the secrets that they hid in plain sight, in their faces, and in their clothes, and in the expressions that flitted across their faces when they thought no one was watching.

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'.

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.

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

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

He was a figment of imagination. A false memory, implanted by my own hopes.

In a dark, dark wood there was a dark, dark house; And in the dark, dark house there was a dark, dark room; And in the dark, dark room there was a dark, dark cupboard; And in the dark, dark cupboard there was . . . a skeleton! —traditional Halloween tale

she had made her way up the corporate ladder by treading on the backs of more young women than you could count, and then, once she was through the glass ceiling, pulling the ladder up behind her. I remembered Rowan once saying, Tina is one of those women who thinks every bit of estrogen in the boardroom is a threat to her own existence.

There’s no reason, on paper at least, why I need these pills to get through life. I had a great childhood, loving parents, the whole package. I wasn’t beaten, abused, or expected to get nothing but As. I had nothing but love and support, but that wasn’t enough somehow. My friend Erin says we all have demons inside us, voices that whisper we’re no good, that if we don’t make this promotion or ace that exam we’ll reveal to the world exactly what kind of worthless sacks of skin and sinew we really are. Maybe that’s true. Maybe mine just have louder voices. But I don’t think it’s as simple as that. The depression I fell into after university wasn’t about exams and self-worth, it was something stranger, more chemical, something that no talking cure was going to fix. Cognitive behavioral therapy, counseling, psychotherapy—none of it really worked in the way that the pills did. Lissie says she finds the notion of chemically rebalancing your mood scary, she says it’s the idea of taking something that could alter how she really is. But I don’t see it that way; for me it’s like wearing makeup—not a disguise, but a way of making myself more how I really am, less raw. The best me I can be.

The literal meaning is, as you say, ‘after me comes the flood’—but the real meaning is something more profound and ambiguous. . . . It means either, ‘after I go, everything will collapse into chaos, because I have been the only person holding up the dam,’ or else something even darker.

In a dark, dark wood there was a dark, dark house; And in the dark, dark house there was a dark, dark room; And in the dark, dark room there was a dark, dark cupboard; And in the dark, dark cupboard there was … a skeleton. Traditional

There’s a kind of focusing effect that happens when you’re very ill. I saw it with my granddad, when he was slipping away. You stop caring about the big stuff. Your world shrinks down to very small concerns: the way your dressing gown cord presses uncomfortably against your ribs, the pain in your spine, the feel of a hand in yours. It’s that narrowing that enables you to cope, I suppose. The wider world stops mattering. And as you grow more and more ill, your world shrinks further, until the only thing that matters is just to keep on breathing.

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.

I thought of all the mums who had dropped their children off talking about how exhausted they were, and the slight contempt I’d felt for them when all they had to deal with was one or two at the most, but now I realized what they’d been talking about. It wasn’t as physical as the work at the nursery, or as intense, but it was the way it stretched, endlessly, the way the needing never stopped, and there was never a moment when you could hand them over to your colleague and run away for a quick fag break to just be yourself. I

There is no higher meaning. Sometimes things happen for no reason. Fate is cruel, and arbitrary. Touching wood, lucky charms, none of it will help you see the car you never saw coming, or avoid the tumor you didn’t realize you had. Quite the opposite, in fact. For in that moment that you turn your head to look for the second magpie, in the hope of changing your fortune from sorrow to joy—that’s when you take your attention away from the things you can change, the crossing light, the speeding car, the moment you should have turned back.

I switched the light out and drew the cover across myself, but I didn't sleep. Instead I lay on my side watching the sea, rising and falling in strange, hypnotic silence outside the thick, storm-proof panes. And I thought, there is a murderer on this boat. And no one knows but me.

Clare watched them from the far sofa, and I found myself watching her, remembering how she loved to observe, how she used to throw a remark out, like a pebble into a pond, and then back quietly away to watch the ripples as people scrapped it out. It was not an endearing habit, but it was one I could not condemn. I understood it too well. I, too, am happier watching than being watched.

the cards do not predict the future. All they 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. All I have to do is understand what they are saying.

The brain doesn’t remember well. It tells stories. It fills in the gaps, and implants those fantasies as memories. I have to try to get the facts . . . But I don’t know if I’m remembering what happened—or what I want to have happened. I am a writer. I’m a professional liar. It’s hard to know when to stop, you know? You see a gap in the narrative, you want to fill it with a reason, a motive, a plausible explanation. And the harder I push, the more the facts dissolve beneath my fingers . . .

Once, a long time ago, a teacher at school had called Hal “a little mouse,” and the description had offended her, though she hadn’t really known why. But now she knew why. Whatever she looked like on the surface, inside, deep in the core of her, she was not a mouse, but something quite different: a rat—small, dark, tenacious, and dogged. And now she felt like a cornered rat, fighting to survive.

Well there's a vacancy. We're one down." "What?" "Melanie, she's gone. The landline's down and it was the last straw." "Christ, you're kidding? It's like Agatha effing Christie and the Ten Little Eskimos." "Indians." "What?" "Ten Little Indians. In the book." "It was Eskimos." "It bloody wasn't. " I sat down on the bed. "It was the N word, actually, if you're going for the original, then Indians, then soldiers when they decided that offing ethnic minorities was maybe a bit strange. It was never Eskimos." "Well, whatever." Nina dismissed the Eskimos with a wave of her hand. "Is there any coffee down there?

Lissie says she finds the notion of chemically rebalancing your mood scary, she says it’s the idea of taking something that could alter how she really is. But I don’t see it that way; for me it’s like wearing makeup—not a disguise, but a way of making myself more how I really am, less raw. The best me I can be.

suppose what I believe is not that the cards can tell you anything you don’t already know, or that they have magical answers to your questions, but that they give you … they give you the space to question …? Does that make sense? Whether the statements I make in a reading are true or false, they give the sitter an opportunity to reflect on those forces, to analyse their instincts. I don’t know if I’m explaining this right.

I choose not to think about these images,” I muttered. “I choose to think about . . .” And then I stopped. What? What? None of Barry’s tutorials had focused on what happy images to choose when you were being held prisoner by a murderer. Was I supposed to think about my mum? About Judah? About everything I loved and held dear and was about to lose? “Insert happy image here, you little fucker,” I whispered, but the place I was inserting it probably wasn’t the one Barry had in mind.

There was genuine hurt in his voice, but I refused to let myself soften. It had been Ben’s favorite tactic in arguments, when we were together, to divert the discussion away from whatever was annoying me to the fact that I’d hurt his feelings and was acting irrationally. Time and again I’d ended up apologizing for the fact that I’d upset him—my own feelings completely ignored, and always, in the process, we’d somehow wound up losing sight of the issue that had provoked the disagreement in the first place. I wasn’t falling for it now.

I stop, thinking of Topher and his cushioned, monied existence--the way he has had everything handed to him on a plate, the way he's never had to scrap for anything, never had to swallow a snub from a boss, or pick up a stranger's dirty underwear, or do any of the myriad demeaning, boring jobs the rest of us take for granted. They are arrogant, that's what I realize--maybe not Liz and Carl quite so much, but all of them to some degree. They are protected by the magic of their shares and their status and their IP. They think that life can't touch them--just like I used to do. Only now it has. Now life has them by the throat. And it won't let go.

The day-trippers who pass through on their way to the sandy beaches up the coast go wild for the nets, taking photographs of the pretty little stone and half-timbered houses swathed in the webbing, as their kids buy ice creams, and gaudy plastic buckets. Some of the nets look pristine, as if they were bought straight from the chandler and have never seen the sea, but others have plainly been used, with the rips that put them out of service still visible, chunks of weed and buoys knotted in the strands. I have never liked them, not from the first moment I saw them. They’re somehow sad and predatory at the same time, like giant cobwebs, slowly engulfing the little houses. It gives the whole place a melancholy air, like those sultry southern American towns, where the Spanish moss hangs thick from the trees, swaying in the wind.

Never believe it, Hal. Never believe your own lies. Because superstition was a trap—that was what she had learned, in the years of plying her trade on the pier. Touching wood, crossing fingers, counting magpies—they were lies, all of them. False promises, designed to give the illusion of control and meaning in a world in which the only destiny came from yourself. You can’t predict the future, Hal, her mother had reminded her, time and time again. You can’t influence fate, or change what’s out of your control. But you can choose what you yourself do with the cards you’re dealt. That was the truth, Hal knew. The painful, uncompromising truth. It was what she wanted to shout at clients, at the ones who came back again and again looking for answers that she could not give. There is no higher meaning. Sometimes things happen for no reason. Fate is cruel, and arbitrary. Touching wood, lucky charms, none of it will help you see the car you never saw coming, or avoid the tumor you didn’t realize you had. Quite the opposite, in fact. For in that moment that you turn your head to look for the second magpie, in the hope of changing your fortune from sorrow to joy—that’s when you take your attention away from the things you can change, the crossing light, the speeding car, the moment you should have turned back. 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.

Never believe it, Hal. Never believe your own lies. Because superstition was a trap—that was what she had learned, in the years of plying her trade on the pier. Touching wood, crossing fingers, counting magpies—they were lies, all of them. False promises, designed to give the illusion of control and meaning in a world in which the only destiny came from yourself. You can’t predict the future, Hal, her mother had reminded her, time and time again. You can’t influence fate, or change what’s out of your control. But you can choose what you yourself do with the cards you’re dealt. That was the truth, Hal knew. The painful, uncompromising truth. It was what she wanted to shout at clients, at the ones who came back again and again looking for answers that she could not give. There is no higher meaning. Sometimes things happen for no reason. Fate is cruel, and arbitrary. Touching wood, lucky charms, none of it will help you see the car you never saw coming, or avoid the tumor you didn’t realize you had. Quite the opposite, in fact. For in that moment that you turn your head to look for the second magpie, in the hope of changing your fortune from sorrow to joy—that’s when you take your attention away from the things you can change, the crossing light, the speeding car, the moment you should have turned back. The people who came to her booth were seeking meaning and control—but they were looking in the wrong place. When they