Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

12. “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

13. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

16. “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

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

— 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. “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

20. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “How marvelous to be able to read someone’s skin, to explore the story of his life across his chest, his arms, the softness at the back of his neck.”

— Gail Honeyman

31. “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

32. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

35. “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

36. “My phone doesn’t ring often – it makes me jump when it does – and it’s usually people asking if I’ve been mis-sold Payment Protection Insurance. I whisper I know where you live to them, and hang up the phone very, very gently.”

— Gail Honeyman

37. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

39. “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

40. “When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.”

— Gail Honeyman

41. “Noticing details, that was good. Tiny slivers of life – they all added up and helped you to feel that you too could be.”

— Gail Honeyman

42. “These days, loneliness is the new cancer – a shameful, embarrassing thing, brought upon yourself in some obscure way. A fearful, incurable thing, so horrifying that you dare not mention it; other people don’t want to hear the word spoken aloud for fear that they might too be afflicted, or that it might tempt fate into visiting a similar horror upon them.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

44. “Oh yes,” she said, and I heard her dismissive sideways hiss of cigarette smoke. “It was just that I wanted to tell you that you’re a pointless waste of human tissue. That was all. Bye then, darling!” she said, bright as a knife.”

— Gail Honeyman

45. “A human hand was exactly the right weight, exactly the right temperature for touching another person, I realized. I’d shaken hands a fair bit over the years – more so recently – but I hadn’t been touched in a lifetime.”

— Gail Honeyman

46. “I feel sorry for beautiful people. Beauty, from the moment you possess it, is already slipping away, ephemeral. That must be difficult. Always having to prove that there’s more to you, wanting people to see beneath the surface, to be loved for yourself, and not your stunning body, sparkling eyes or thick, lustrous hair.”

— Gail Honeyman

47. “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

48. “The man who had served us was lounging at the counter, nodding his head in time with the music. It was a cacophonous din, with too many guitars and not enough melody. 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 neighbour’s back garden.”

— Gail Honeyman

49. “I’m not bad and it’s not my fault. I didn’t make her bad, and I’m not bad for wanting nothing to do with her, for feeling sad and angry – no, furious – about what she did.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman