“Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“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?”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“The things I want to remember I can't, and the things I try so hard to forget just keep coming.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“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.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“She felt it when she woke, not a presence but an absence.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“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.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“Imagine walking past the place where you lost someone, every single day.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“Anything was possible. When you hear hooves you look for horses, but you can’t discount zebras.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“But then I suppose I’ve never really lost anyone. How would I know what that kind of grief feels like?”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“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, quote from Into the Water
“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.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“Watching someone in the throes of raw grief is a terrible thing; the act of watching feels violent, intrusive, a violation. Yet we do it, we have to do it, all the time; you just have to learn to cope with it whatever way you can.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“Beckford is not a suicide spot. Beckford is a place to get rid of troublesome women.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“You stung me like that often; cruelty always was your strong suit.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“they never saw what the water really was, greenish-black and filled with living things and dying things. Out”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“She used to think that only parents can understand the sort of love that swallows you up, but now she wondered whether it was only mothers who did.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“We tell our stories differently, don't we, you and I?”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“the horrors conjured up by the mind are always so much worse than what is.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“Some say the women left something of themselves in the water; some say it retains some of their power, for ever since then it has drawn to its shores the unlucky, the desperate, the unhappy, the lost. They come here to swim with their sisters.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“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.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“In between them stood an elephant and she felt she ought to point it out.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“...the past shooting out at me like sparrows for the hedgerow, startling and inescapable.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“All this guilt, this doubt, it was corrosive. It was changing her, twisting her. She was not the woman she used to be. She could feel herself slipping, slithering as though she were shedding a skin, and she didn’t like the rawness underneath, she didn’t like the smell of it. It made her feel vulnerable, it made her feel afraid.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection. —Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“As histórias dos adultos eram cheias de crueldades idiotas: criancinhas impedidas de entrar na escola porque tinham a cor de pele errada, gente surrada ou morta por adorar o deus errado.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“There are people who are drawn to water, who retain some vestigial primal sense of where it flows. I believe that I am one of them. I am most alive when I am near the water, when I am near this water. This is the place where I learned to swim, the place where I learned to inhabit nature and my body in the most joyous and pleasurable way.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“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.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“¿Cómo es que puedo recordar con semejante perfección las cosas que me sucedieron cuando tenía ocho años y, en cambio, me resulta imposible recordar si he hablado o no con mis colegas sobre el cambio de fecha de la evaluación de un cliente? Las cosas que quiero recordar se me olvidan, y las que intento olvidar no dejan de acudir a mi mente.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“I was running along the coastal path, clasping Mum's bracelet to my wrist. I was terrified that it was going to drop off and go sliding down the cliff into the sea. I wanted to put it in my mouth for safekeeping, like crocodiles do with their babies.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from Into the Water
“Is that it?” Jack asked. “No. That is the Xing zheng yuan Hui an Xun fang Shu.” “I was just going to say that,” Tessa said.”
― Richard Paul Evans, quote from Hunt for Jade Dragon
“The record is replete with witnesses reporting that they were intimidated
by various authorities. Could all of them, unconnected and unknown to
each other, be having the same fantasies? And if the threats were real, the
obvious question is: why would any law enforcement officer at any level,
or any anonymous phone caller, for that matter, threaten someone if the
assassination was the result of a random act by a lone nut that was no longer
alive? But this is akin to asking why any information about the murder
of John F. Kennedy was ever withheld, let alone still withheld after fifty
years, on the grounds of “national security” if Lee Harvey Oswald was a
minimum-wage loser, with no conspirators, who was out to impress his
estranged wife.”
― Donald Jeffries, quote from Hidden History: An Exposé of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics
“It’s okay to want me, you know,” Linden says thickly.
My stomach quivers. I manage to shake my head and now his fingers are trailing behind my neck, running into the base of my hair and another shiver escapes down my back.
“Since when is it ever okay to want your best friend?” I say softly, nearly choking on the words. Because that’s what he is, that’s what he’s always been.
He smiled gently, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “Isn’t that the best person to want? The person that knows you inside and out. The person who has seen you at your ugliest and most beautiful and still wants to be with you. The person who believes in you and has your back, no matter what.”
― Karina Halle, quote from The Pact
“Because destiny had a different plan. They were supposed to meet later. People come into our lives at certain times for various reasons having to do with lessons to be learned. It is not a coincidence that they didn’t meet at a much earlier age when they did not have other commitments. I think the reason people meet later is to learn about love in many different ways and about how to balance this with responsibility and commitment. They’ll meet again in a different lifetime. They must be patient.”
― Brian L. Weiss, quote from Same Soul, Many Bodies: Discover the Healing Power of Future Lives through Progression Therapy
“-I'm glad you're my dad. I love your sound. William took that to mean 'I love you' for sound was all he was to Bonaventure. 'I love you too,' he said.”
― quote from The Silence of Bonadventure Arrow
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.