Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “As if a silver in the egg-and-spoon race was some sort of compensation for not understanding how to use an apostrophe.”

— Gail Honeyman

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “It takes a long time to learn to live with loss, assuming you ever manage it. After all these years, I’m still something of a work in progress in that regard.”

— Gail Honeyman

56. “It’s not you, libraries, it’s me, as the popular saying goes. The thought of books passing through so many unwashed hands – people reading them in the bath, letting their dogs sit on them, picking their nose and wiping the results on the pages. People eating cheesy crisps and then reading a few chapters without washing their hands first. I just can’t. No, I look for books with one careful owner.”

— Gail Honeyman

57. “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

58. “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

59. “Pilot is there too, the handsome, soulful-eyed hound. If the book has one failing, it’s that there is insufficient mention of Pilot. You can’t have too much dog in a book.”

— Gail Honeyman

60. “There have been times when I felt that I might die of loneliness. People sometimes say they might die of boredom, that they’re dying for a cup of tea, but for me, dying of loneliness is not hyperbole. When I feel like that, my head drops and my shoulders slump and I ache, I physically ache, for human contact – I truly feel that I might tumble to the ground and pass away if someone doesn’t hold me, touch me.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

62. “Your voice changes when you’re smiling, it alters the sound somehow.”

— Gail Honeyman

63. “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

64. “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

65. “When people ask me what I do – taxi drivers, hairdressers – I tell them I work in an office.”

— Gail Honeyman

66. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

68. “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

69. “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

70. “Once you get used to being on your own, it becomes normal. It certainly had become so for me.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

72. “Some people, weak people, fear solitude. What they fail to understand is that there’s something very liberating about it; once you realize 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.”

— Gail Honeyman

73. “A philosophical question: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if a woman who’s wholly alone occasionally talks to a pot plant, is she certifiable?”

— Gail Honeyman

74. “Oh yes, I know exactly what you are. And I know how you’ll end up. Listen, the past isn’t over. The past is a living thing. Those lovely scars of yours – they’re from the past, aren’t they? And yet they still live on your plain little face. Do they still hurt?”

— Gail Honeyman

75. “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

76. “I felt like a trapped animal – a steer or a rabid dog and imagined the chaos I’d caused if, careering wildly, I was corralled in there against my will.”

— Gail Honeyman

77. “I bought some cat food for Glen on the way home. The thing about Glen is that, despite her offhand manner, she loves me. I know she’s only a cat. But it’s still love; animals, people. It’s unconditional, and it’s both the easiest and the hardest thing in the world.”

— Gail Honeyman

78. “I was a thirty-year-old woman with a juvenile crush on a man whom I didn’t know, and would never know.”

— Gail Honeyman

79. “Nature should make her presence felt in the room in some way, I thought; living nature. Not cut flowers.”

— Gail Honeyman

80. “It is incomprehensible to me now that I could ever have thought that anyone would love this ambulant bag of blood and bones.”

— Gail Honeyman

81. “The only criterion I have is that the books must look clean, which means that I have to disregard a lot of potential reading material in the charity shop. I don’t use the library for the same reason, althought obviously, in principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder.”

— Gail Honeyman

82. “I had convinced myself that he was the one, that he would help to make me normal, fix things that were wrong with my life. Someone to help me deal with Mommy, block out her voice when she whispered in my ear, telling me I was bad, I was wrong, I wasn’t good enough. Why have I thought that?”

— Gail Honeyman

83. “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

84. “She wasn’t actually chewing gum, but her demeanor was very much that of a gum chewer.”

— Gail Honeyman

85. “When you’re struggling hard to manage your own emotions, it becomes unbearable to have to witness other people’s, to have to try and manage theirs too.”

— Gail Honeyman

86. “If I’m ever unsure as to the correct course of action, I’ll think, “What would a ferret do?” or, “How would a salamander respond to this situation?” Invariably, I find the right answer.”

— Gail Honeyman

87. “Mummy told me, years ago, that men go absolutely crazy for sausage rolls.”

— Gail Honeyman

88. “This part of the city was aggressively gray, but green life still struggled into being: moss on walls, weeds in guttering, the occasional forlorn tree. I have always lived in urban areas, but I feel the need for green as a visceral longing.”

— Gail Honeyman

89. “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

90. “Based on past experience, I’d be more likely to end up living in Dante Lane or Poe Crescent.”

— Gail Honeyman

91. “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

92. “Entertaining is not my area of expertise, I’ll admit that, but surely, if you are a host, you are responsible for ensuring that your guests are provided with a libation? That’s a basic principle of hospitality, in all societies and cultures, and has been since recorded time. In the event, I drank tap water – I rarely imbibe alcohol in public. I only really enjoy it when I’m alone, at home.”

— Gail Honeyman

93. “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. “Raymond,” I said, “you can’t know how much it means to me, to have a friend – a genuine, caring friend.”

— Gail Honeyman

94. “Eyelids are really just flesh curtains. Your eyes are always ‘on’, always looking; when you close them, you’re watching the thin, veined skin of your inner eyelid rather than staring out at the world.”

— Gail Honeyman

95. “She was writing in her notebook, and looked up. “Did you ever wish you had a father, or a father figure in your life, Eleanor? Was it something that you missed?” I stared at my hands. It was difficult, talking openly about these things, dragging them out for inspection when they’d been perfectly fine as they were, hidden away.”

— Gail Honeyman

96. “In principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder.”

— Gail Honeyman

97. “Es igual de injusto desagradar a alguien por ser atractivo que por tener una deformidad.”

— Gail Honeyman

98. “I wanted to die – this time, in addition to actually wanting to die, I meant it in the metaphorical sense too. Oh, come on now, I thought to myself, almost amused; just how desperately, on how many levels, does a person have to wish to die before it’s actually allowed to happen? Please?”

— Gail Honeyman

99. “I have often noticed that people who routinely wear sportswear are the least likely sort to participate in athletic activity.”

— Gail Honeyman

100. “Until now, anytime that emotions, feelings, had threatened to unsettle me, I’d drink them down fast, drown them. That had allowed me to exist, but I was starting to.”

— Gail Honeyman