Quotes from Into the Water

“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

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Popular quotes

“Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from The Silver Linings Playbook

“A little extra forgiveness never hurts," said Matt, quoting one of Celia's favorite sayings.”
― Nancy Farmer, quote from The House of the Scorpion

“...the past was so painful at any point. It seared and burned.”
― Theodore Dreiser, quote from An American Tragedy

“I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch – hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into – some fearful, devastating scourge, I know – and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever – read the symptoms – discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it – wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance – found, as I expected, that I had that too, – began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically – read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.

...

I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for nothing, when I fancy I’m ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to him now. “What a doctor wants,” I said, “is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each.” So I went straight up and saw him, and he said:

“Well, what’s the matter with you?”

I said:

“I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is NOT the matter with me. I have not got housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I HAVE got.”

And I told him how I came to discover it all.

Then he opened me and looked down me, and clutched hold of my wrist, and then he hit me over the chest when I wasn’t expecting it – a cowardly thing to do, I call it – and immediately afterwards butted me with the side of his head. After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription, and folded it up and gave it me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.

I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist’s, and handed it in. The man read it, and then handed it back.

He said he didn’t keep it.

I said:

“You are a chemist?”

He said:

“I am a chemist. If I was a co-operative stores and family hotel combined, I might be able to oblige you. Being only a chemist hampers me.”

I read the prescription. It ran:

“1 lb. beefsteak, with
1 pt. bitter beer
every 6 hours.
1 ten-mile walk every morning.
1 bed at 11 sharp every night.
And don’t stuff up your head with things you don’t understand.”

I followed the directions, with the happy result – speaking for myself – that my life was preserved, and is still going on.”
― Jerome K. Jerome, quote from Three Men in a Boat

“But I tell you one thing, I don't want to be immortal if it mean living forever, cause then everybody else just die and get old in front of you while you stay the same, and that's just sad.”
― Rebecca Skloot, quote from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

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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.

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