Into the Water Quotes

“Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.”
― Paula Hawkins, 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, 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, Into the Water

“She felt it when she woke, not a presence but an absence.”
― Paula Hawkins, 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, Into the Water

“The horrors conjured up by the mind are always so much worse than what is.”
― Paula Hawkins, 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, Into the Water

“We tell our stories differently, don't we, you and I?”
― Paula Hawkins, Into the Water

“Imagine walking past the place where you lost someone, every single day.”
― Paula Hawkins, Into the Water

“Anything was possible. When you hear hooves you look for horses, but you can’t discount zebras.”
― Paula Hawkins, 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, 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, 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, Into the Water

“Beckford is not a suicide spot. Beckford is a place to get rid of troublesome women.”
― Paula Hawkins, 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, 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, Into the Water

“You stung me like that often; cruelty always was your strong suit.”
― Paula Hawkins, Into the Water

“I thought how odd it was that parents believe they know their children, understand their children. Do they not remember what it was like to be eighteen, or fifteen, or twelve? Perhaps having children makes you forget being one.”
― Paula Hawkins, 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, 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, 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, Into the Water

“They never saw what the water really was, greenish-black and filled with living things and dying things.”
― Paula Hawkins, Into the Water

“...the past shooting out at me like sparrows for the hedgerow, startling and inescapable.”
― Paula Hawkins, 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, 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, Into the Water

“I thought rape was something a bad man did to you, a man who jumped out at you in an alleyway in the dead of night, a man who held a knife to your throat. I didn't think boys did it. Not schoolboys like Robbie, not good-looking boys, the ones who go out with the prettiest girls in town. I didn't think they did it to you in your own living room, I didn't think they talked to you about it afterwards and asked you if you'd had a good time. I just thought I must have done something wrong, that I hadn't made it clear enough that I didn't want it.”
― Paula Hawkins, Into the Water

“no one told you how slow you would become, and how bored you would be by your slowness.”
― Paula Hawkins, Into the Water

“Kindness was her new project. She hoped it might be gentler on the soul than anger.”
― Paula Hawkins, 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, 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, Into the Water