The Girl On The Train Quotes
"My mother used to tell me that I had an overactive imagination; Tom said that, too."
"There’s something comforting about the sight of strangers safe at home."
"Living like this, the way I’m living at the moment, is harder in the summer when there is so much daylight."
"I know every brick, I know the color of the curtains in the upstairs bedroom."
"I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head."
"Life is not a paragraph, and death is no parenthesis."
"I have been thinking about Jess all day, unable to focus on anything but what I saw this morning."
"I am sober, stone-cold. Some days I feel so bad that I have to drink; some days I feel so bad that I can’t."
"I am not the girl I used to be. I am no longer desirable, I’m off-putting in some way."
"I need to find something that I must do, something undeniable."
"The closer we get to Euston, the more anxious I feel; pressure builds."
"I once read a book by a former alcoholic where she described giving oral sex to two different men, men she’d just met in a restaurant on a busy London high street."
"Hatred floods me. If I saw that woman now, if I saw Jess, I would spit in her face."
"Technology’s not really your strong point, is it, Rach?"
"I cannot sleep in the mornings; I cannot snooze peacefully until midday. I wake abruptly, my breath jagged and heart racing, my mouth stale, and I know immediately that's it. I'm awake."
"The day stretches out in front of me, not a minute of it filled."
"In another life, I woke early, too, the sound of the 8:04 rumbling past; I opened my eyes and listened to the rain against the window."
"The pain is solid and heavy, it sits in the middle of my chest."
"This isn't a good idea. I know it's not a good idea. But what harm can it do?"
"Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes it's there in front of my eyes in seconds. Sometimes it doesn't come at all."
"I feel nauseated, dizzy. I run my hands through my hair, over my scalp. I flinch."
"I could see myself a few metres in, slumped against the wall, my head in my hands, and both head and hands smeared with blood."
"Total black; hours lost, never to be retrieved."
"It was so surreal having her presented to me like that, the perfect blonde I’d watched, whose life I’d constructed and deconstructed in my head."
"I didn’t know if I’d seen her. I honestly didn’t know. I still don’t."
"The police think I’m a rubbernecker. They think I’m a stalker, a nutcase, mentally unstable."
"I knew him. I really feel that, crazy as it sounds. I’ve seen the way he is with her. He couldn’t hurt her."
"The thing about being barren is that you’re not allowed to get away from it. Not when you’re in your thirties."
"I felt isolated in my misery. I became lonely, so I drank a bit, and then a bit more, and then I became lonelier, because no one likes being around a drunk."
"There were times, at my lowest, when the hunger was at its worst, when I thought I was going to lose my mind."
"The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps."
"I thought that over time it got chipped away, bit by bit, by life, by the living of it."
"I am better than I was a few years ago, when I used to abandon my trolley and leave the supermarket if the place was packed with mums and kids."
"Drunk Rachel sees no consequences, she is either excessively expansive and optimistic or wrapped up in hate. She has no past, no future. She exists purely in the moment."
"I want to drag knives over my skin, just so that I can feel something other than shame, but I’m not even brave enough to do that."
"Megan is not a mystery to be solved, she is not a figure who wanders into the tracking shot at the beginning of a film, beautiful, ethereal, insubstantial."
"The breath was catching in my throat, I couldn't speak."
"It's not like me. None of this is like me. I don't get rejected. I'm the one who walks away."
"Appearances can be deceptive—they say Ted Bundy looked like Cary Grant."
"They had him. They had him and they let him go."
"Something to look forward to in the morning."
"I just want to know, what lies has Kamal told them? What lies have they been fool enough to believe?"
"I can’t bear not to, but there is never anything to see any longer."
"If I don’t spit out the poison, I feel like I’ll never sleep."
"I wasn’t so bad. I mean, it was horrible, of course, painful and frightening, but… then there she was."
"If I don’t do it now, I might never have the courage to say the words out loud, I might lose them altogether, they might stick in my throat and choke me in my sleep."
"If only my head was straight… but there it is."
"In it, I’ve done something wrong, but I don’t know what it is, all I know is that it cannot be put right."
"You wanted to tell me something?" He is a man on autopilot, he doesn’t look me in the eye. He looks defeated.
"I’m sorry your life is a total fucking disaster, but believe me, it’s a picnic compared to mine."
"My wife is dead, and the police think I killed her."
"I know what it is to love someone and to say the most terrible things to them, in anger or anguish."
"I can still feel it," I tell him. "At night, I can still feel it. It’s the thing I dread, the thing that keeps me awake: the feeling of being alone in that house."
"It’s impossible to resist the kindness of strangers. Someone who looks at you, who doesn’t know you, who tells you it’s OK, whatever you did, whatever you’ve done: you suffered, you hurt, you deserve forgiveness."
"I don’t want to push you into doing something you don’t want to do."
"But he abandoned you. You were alone, afraid, panicking, grieving."
"I wanted it. I wanted to be with Jason. I wanted to feel what Jess felt when she sat out there with him, drinking wine in the evening."
"I want to lean my head back against the headrest and close my eyes and smell the pine and listen to the birds."
"You have to bear in mind that subjects under hypnosis are very suggestible."
"I’m just sitting here, waiting to take the sheets out of the tumble dryer."
"I’m doing the things she did: drinking alone and snooping on him."
"This is what I’m thinking about while I’m unloading the dishwasher, with great care and precision."
"He might be a very good liar, but I know when he’s telling the truth."
"You don’t have to be afraid of being alone. It’s not the worst thing, is it?"
"No more lying, no more hiding, no more running, no more bullshit."
"You can trust yourself to do the right thing."
"You don’t need me. And you don’t need to keep running. You’ll be fine."
"Perhaps running and hiding is exactly what I need to do."
"No more lies, no more hiding. It’s time for Daddy to face up to his responsibilities."
"He wanted her, he took her. But not this. He couldn’t do this."
"You couldn’t love a man who would do that, could you?"
"You have no idea how exhausting it is, coping with people like you."
"I loved you both, I really did, but you can both be incredibly weak."
"Do you have any idea how boring you became, Rachel? How ugly?"
"It was just one hit, but she was... I didn't mean for this."
"I'm not going away. I am going to make you pay for this."
"You think I'm being cruel, but I'm not. I'm telling the truth."
"It was self-defence," she told them. "I saw the whole thing."