The Blue Hour

by Paula Hawkins

This freedom is intoxicating I eat when I please work when I please come and go when I please. I answer to no one, only the tide.

all the hedgerows are dying and the sky has been stubbornly white for weeks, the meadows are scorched, the earth parched. I long for water, for green and blue and violet.

I can’t describe how I felt; it wasn’t just despair, it was darkness like I have not known before, it was hatred.

single-minded and selfish are just synonyms for childless, in some circles.”

I am single-minded, obsessive. All the usual shit they say about women who fail to devote themselves body and soul to family aka dreary domesticity.

whatever it is, your thing, the thing you enjoy—you go to a place, and it’s beautiful and unspoiled, and you are doing that thing you love, and then someone—not always a man, I suppose, but usually a man—comes along and transforms it into an ugly place. And you never feel safe there again. And you are never the same again. The place is changed and you are changed, and neither for the better.”