The Blue Hour Quotes

“Art is legacy, it is solace. It soothes, consoles, arouses. It’s work. It’s what you do all day. It’s how you work things out, how you understand the world. It’s the opportunity to start over, to shed your skin, to take revenge, to fall in love. To be good. To live long.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“Staying sane is a trick. It’s a technique: sanity is something you hold on to—loosen your grip for too long, allow your mind to go to the places it fears or the places it craves, and you risk letting it slip away. There are things that, for the sake of your sanity, you do not allow yourself to recall.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“¿Qué podría haber dicho si alguien le hubiera preguntado? ¿Cómo podría haberlo explicado cuando todos los demás amores se ven como relaciones subordinadas al amor romántico? Lo que Vanessa y ella tenían no era romántico ni tampoco había subordinación alguna. «Solo una amiga», es lo que dice la gente. «Ah, no es más que una amiga.» Como si una amiga fuera algo normal y corriente, como si una amiga no pudiera significarlo todo.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“Grace stood up and turned off the tap. "Yes it was." she looked at Vanessa, at her glassy eyes and her petulant expression; Grace wanted to slap her. "Men like him...they have a special kind of contempt for women like me - ugly women. I've felt it all my life. An ugly woman is barely human to a man like your husband. It's sickening but not all that shocking. What's worse, what is utterly abject, is the way that women like you - the pretty, the chosen - the way you collude in that contempt. simpering like a schoolgirl, because a man has aid you some attention. Laughing cravenly at his cruelties. It's pathetic.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“was”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“She’s read the literature, she knows that attachment patterns are laid down in the first few years of life, that infants must have their needs met by some consistent presence that soothes and feeds and pays them the right sort of attention.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“act”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“Grace Haswell is ugly. Becker is surprised by how ugly she is, and ashamed of the thought even as it occurs to him.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“cannot infer a man’s propensity for violence from how he looks. She has set bones broken by soft hands, stitched cuts inflicted by men with easy smiles and white collars; she’s met brutes with angel faces.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“focus, when the trees became the wood and the sheepskin fell away to show me the wolf. Maybe I did glimpse it right away, maybe I was too frightened to acknowledge it. Too frightened or too loving. I don’t think I knew then how murderous love can be. I only know it was already too late. And now it’s too late to tell.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“The light is failing, shadows gathering and thickening. Marguerite has a phrase for it: l’heure entre loup et chien, the hour between a wolf and a dog. The time at which one thing might appear to be another, when something benign might appear threatening, when an enemy might come calling in the shape of a friend.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“can make out the wave, the drag of a current, the build of swell, but it is the critical moment that eludes me, the moment of breaking, when all that stored power is unleashed, that moment of terrible chaos. Impossible.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“The sky challenges, but the sea confounds: restless, ever-changing, the deep round swell of it, the violence! Impossible to capture.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“There’s an agreement between the three of them, unspoken but binding. They will behave like grown-ups; they will be civilized. It’s the only way they can continue to live and work together, to remain friends. The hurt and the damage have to stay beneath the surface so that eventually, at some point, it will rot away. That’s the theory, anyway. The odd thing is that, of the three of them, it is Becker who finds their little triangle uncomfortable and unrealistic. Helena is unfazed, inured perhaps by a lifetime of men competing for her affections, and Sebastian—the loser—has taken it on the chin. Becker won, so why can’t he get over it? “I thought it was a good piece,”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“After the show closed we went to Izzy’s, ostensibly for dinner, though no food ever materialized. Awful people—Bullingdon bores, dullards who come from money and who look down on me because I don’t—all talking incessantly about holidays and property prices. The energy it takes to disguise my contempt could power a city. All the while, Julian kept looking at me and smiling and telling me how proud he was. He’s already spending the money.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“Beck.” Helena smiles at him, shakes her head. “Sweetheart, be serious. You don’t think the press might be interested in the fact that a human bone has been found to form part of a sculpture made by the late, great, reclusive, enigmatic Vanessa Chapman? The same Vanessa Chapman whose notoriously unfaithful husband went missing twenty years ago? His body never found?”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“For some reason I keep thinking of the time I broke my wrist. The crack! The impression of whiteness, of my mind clearing. The clarity that comes from pain.
Pain is clear, grief a fog.
Solitude, too, is clarifying, revelatory.
Love, like grief, obscures.
Creation from destruction takes courage, it is an act of will, it is violent, like hope.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“For some reason I keep thinking of the time I broke my wrist. The crack! The impression of whiteness, of my mind clearing. The clarity that comes from pain. Pain is clear, grief a fog. Solitude, too, is clarifying, revelatory. Love, like grief, obscures. Creation from destruction takes courage, it is an act of will, it is violent, like hope.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“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.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“You cannot infer a man’s propensity for violence from how he looks. She has set bones broken by soft hands, stitched cuts inflicted by men with easy smiles and white collars; she’s met brutes with angel faces.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“Ahora que mi esperanza, antaño violenta, es algo pequeño y patético, he de ser práctica. He de pensar qué sucederá cuando ya no esté. A una parte de mí le da igual. ¿Qué más da? Al fin y al cabo, una vida no es una colección de cosas. ¿Qué más da lo que dejamos atrás si las olas no paran de romper, implacables y ajenas a todo? ¿Qué más da, si un día — probablemente dentro de no mucho — esta isla estará bajo el mar, y también la casa, y el peñasco y todos los huesos que alberga?
Por alguna razón, importa. Lo que dejas atrás importa. El arte que creaste, o la gente. Los amigos a los que quisiste. El bien que hiciste, el mal.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“Se supone que las mujeres no deben mirar, ¿verdad?
Deben ser ellas el objeto de las miradas.
Y si ven algo violento o feo o aterrador, deben taparse los ojos y desfallecer, deben encogerse de miedo. Deben apartar la mirada.
No deben acercarse, aguzar la mirada e inspeccionar, examinar y observar y valorar.
No deben hacer del horror algo propio.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“Permanecer cuerda requiere esfuerzo.
Es una técnica: la cordura es algo a lo que una tiene que aferrarse; si afloja la presa durante demasiado tiempo y permite que su mente se escabulla a los lugares que teme, o a los lugares que desea, corre el riesgo de perder el control. Hay cosas que, por el bien de su cordura, una no puede permitirse a sí misma rememorar.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“Todo vale en el amor y la guerra, y la amistad también es amor, ¿no? Y, a veces, también una especie de guerra.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“Dejar atrás el pasado es una empresa necesariamente selectiva. Hay recuerdos que atesoramos y otros que optamos por soltar.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“El dolor es claro; la aflicción, oscura.
La soledad también es esclarecedora y reveladora.
El amor, como la aflicción, encubre.
Crear a partir de la destrucción requiere valentía, es un acto de voluntad, es violento, como la esperanza.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“Su aspecto no parece amenazador, pero Grace es consciente de que no tiene sentido deducir el nivel de amenaza de alguien por su apariencia. No se puede inferir la propensión a la violencia de un hombre en base a sus pintas. Ella ha ensalmado huesos rotos por manos suaves, ha cosido cortes infligidos por hombres de sonrisa fácil y buena fachada, ha conocido bestias de rostro angelical.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“Vanessa Chapman’s diary Women aren’t supposed to look, are they? They’re supposed to be looked at. And if they see something violent or ugly or frightening, they’re supposed to cover their eyes and swoon, they’re supposed to flinch. They’re supposed to look away. They’re not supposed to move closer, to narrow their eyes and peer, to examine and observe and appraise.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“out,”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“You cannot infer a man’s propensity for violence from how he looks”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour