Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I have been waiting for death all my life. I do not mean that I actively wish to die, just that I do not really want to be alive.”

— Gail Honeyman

2. “Sometimes you’re too quick to judge people. There are all kinds of reasons why they might not look like the kind of person you’d want to sit next to on a bus, but you can’t sum someone up in a ten-second glance. That’s simply not enough time.”

— Gail Honeyman

3. “Fire tests gold, and adversity tests the brave.”

— Gail Honeyman

4. “The things I’ve seen cannot be unseen. The things I’ve done cannot be undone.”

— Gail Honeyman

5. “When I stood up and finally tied the handles, a jaunty pop music song was playing and I realised what I felt... happy. It was such a strange, unusual feeling – light, calm as though I’d swallowed sunshine.”

— Gail Honeyman

6. “At the office, there was that palpable sense of Friday joy, everyone colluding with the lie that somehow the weekend would be amazing and that, next week, work would be different, better. They never learn.”

— Gail Honeyman

7. “The moment hung in time like a drop of honey from a spoon, heavy, golden.”

— Gail Honeyman

8. “Some people, weak people, fear solitude. What they fail to understand is that there’s something very liberating about it; once you realise that you don’t need anyone, you can take care of yourself. That’s the thing: it’s best just to take care of yourself. You can’t protect other people, however hard you try. You try, and you fail, and your world collapses around you, burns down to ashes.”

— Gail Honeyman

9. “In the end, what matters is this: I survived.” I gave him a very small smile. “I survived, Raymond!” I said, knowing that I was both lucky and unlucky, and grateful for it.”

— Gail Honeyman

10. “I, however, had no one. I do not light up a room when I walk into it. No one longs to see me or to hear my voice. I do not feel sorry for myself, not in the least. These are simply statements of fact. I have been waiting for death all my life. I do not mean that I actively wish to die, just that I do not really want to be alive. Something had shifted now, and I realized that I didn’t need to wait for death. I didn’t want to. I unscrewed the bottle and drank.”

— Gail Honeyman

11. “In the end, what matters is this: I survived.”

— Gail Honeyman

12. “She looked at him with so much love that I had to turn away. At least I know what love looks like, I told myself. That’s something. No one had ever looked at me like that, but I’d be able to recognize it if they ever did.”

— Gail Honeyman

13. “Time only blunts the pain of loss. It doesn’t erase it.”

— Gail Honeyman

14. “That’s the thing: it’s best just to take care of yourself. You can’t protect other people, however hard you try. You try, and you fail, and your world collapses around you, burns down to ashes.”

— Gail Honeyman

15. “If someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn’t spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say.”

— Gail Honeyman

16. “I have always taken great pride in managing my life alone. I’m a sole survivor – I’m Eleanor Oliphant. I don’t need anyone else – there’s no big hole in my life, no missing part of my own particular puzzle. I am a self-contained entity. That’s what I’ve always told myself, at any rate.”

— Gail Honeyman

17. “You’re braver and stronger than you give yourself credit for. Keep going.”

— Gail Honeyman

18. “It was, I thought, the sound of madness, the kind of music that lunatics hear in their heads just before they slice the heads off foxes and throw them into their neighbor’s back garden.”

— Gail Honeyman

19. “I’d tried to cope alone for far too long, and it hadn’t done me any good at all. Sometimes you simply needed someone kind to sit with you while you dealt with things.”

— Gail Honeyman

20. “You’re doing it already, Eleanor. You’re braver and stronger than you give yourself credit for. Keep going.”

— Gail Honeyman

21. “My life, I realized, had gone wrong. Very, very wrong. I wasn’t supposed to live like this. No one was supposed to live like this. The problem was that I simply didn’t know how to make it right.”

— Gail Honeyman

22. “Grief is the price we pay for love, so they say. The price is far too high.”

— Gail Honeyman

23. “These days, loneliness is the new cancer – a shameful, embarrassing thing, brought upon yourself in some obscure way.”

— Gail Honeyman

24. “Sometimes you simply needed someone kind to sit with you while you dealt with things.”

— Gail Honeyman

25. “I pictured a sky. It was blue-black, soft and dense as fur. Across and over the expanse of night, into the velvet depths of it, light was scattered, enough for a thousand darknesses. Patterns revealed themselves; the eye, exquisitely dazzled, sought out snailshell whorls and shattered pearls, gods and beasts and planets. As we stood still, yet we rotated, and, whilst turning, moved in a larger circle, round and round the sun, and oh, the dizzying momentum of it...”

— Gail Honeyman

26. “There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I’d lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock. The threads tighten slightly from Monday to Friday.”

— Gail Honeyman

27. “Every meal should be an epicurean feast for the senses.”

— Gail Honeyman

28. “It often feels as if I’m not here, that I’m a figment of my own imagination. There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar.”

— Gail Honeyman

29. “El mundo estaba lleno de posibilidades infinitas.”

— Gail Honeyman

30. “For heaven’s sake, please don’t trouble yourself by being proactive and pushing forward with it. Oh no, heaven forfend. Please – continue to do nothing. Go and sit in your empty little flat and watch television on your own, just like you do Every. Single. Night.”

— Gail Honeyman

31. “Some people, weak people, fear solitude. What they fail to understand is that you don’t need anyone, you can take care of yourself.”

— Gail Honeyman

32. “We waited at the pedestrian crossing, and he was silent at last. I watched an old man stagger down the opposite side of the road.”

— Gail Honeyman

33. “There are scars on my heart, just as thick, as disfiguring as those on my face. I know they’re there. I hope some undamaged tissue remains, a patch through which love can come in and flow out. I hope.”

— Gail Honeyman

34. “I’d tried so hard, but something about me just didn’t fit. There was, it seemed, no Eleanor-shaped social hole for me to slot into. I wasn’t good at pretending, that was the thing.”

— Gail Honeyman

35. “Although it’s good to try new things and to keep an open mind, it’s also extremely important to stay true to who you really are.”

— Gail Honeyman

36. “I pondered what else I should take for him. Flowers seemed wrong; they’re a love token, after all. I looked in the fridge, and popped a packet of cheese slices into the bag. All men like cheese.”

— Gail Honeyman

37. “The voice in my own head – my own voice – was actually quite sensible, and rational, I’d begun to realize. It was Mummy’s voice that had done all the judging, and encouraged me to do so too. I was getting to quite like my own voice, my own thoughts. I wanted more of them. They made me feel good, calm even. They made me feel like me.”

— Gail Honeyman

38. “I took one of my hands in the other, tried to imagine what it would feel like if it was another person’s hand holding mine. There have been times where I felt that I might die of loneliness.”

— Gail Honeyman

39. “They hate me, but they don’t actually wish me dead. I don’t think so, anyway.”

— Gail Honeyman

40. “I simply didn’t know how to make things better. I could not solve the puzzle of me.”

— Gail Honeyman

41. “Pain is easy; pain is something with which I am familiar.”

— Gail Honeyman

42. “This is what I felt: the warm weight of his hands on me; the genuineness in his smile; the gentle heat of something opening, the way some flowers spread out in the morning at the sight of the sun. I knew what was happening.”

— Gail Honeyman

43. “There is no such thing as hell, of course, but if there was, then the sound track to the screaming, the pitchfork action and the infernal wailing of damned souls would be a looped medley of “show tunes” drawn from the annals of musical theater.”

— Gail Honeyman

44. “I thought back to the counselling sessions, how we’d talked about thinking things through rationally, recognizing unhelpful patterns of behaviour and being brave enough to try doing things differently.”

— Gail Honeyman

45. “A boyfriend – a husband? – might just do the trick. It wasn’t that I needed anyone. I was, as I previously stated, perfectly fine.”

— Gail Honeyman

46. “This is what I felt: the warm weight of his hands on me; the genuineness in his smile; the gentle heat of something opening, the way some flowers spread out in the morning at the sight of the sun. I knew what was happening. It was the unscarred piece of my heart. It was just big enough to let in a bit of affection. There was still a tiny bit of room left.”

— Gail Honeyman

47. “You forget that the world is full of ordinary decent people like yourselves, good Samaritans who’ll stop and help a soul in need.”

— Gail Honeyman

48. “I simply fail to see how the act of legally formalizing a human relationship necessitates friends, family and co-workers upgrading the contents of their kitchen for them.”

— Gail Honeyman

49. “Obscenity is the distinguishing hallmark of a sadly limited vocabulary.”

— Gail Honeyman

50. “It wasn’t that you could take them for granted, as such – heaven knows, nothing can be taken for granted in this life – it was simply that you would know, almost unthinkingly, that they’d be there if you needed them, no matter how bad things got.”

— Gail Honeyman