Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “I don’t think anyone on earth would understand what it feels like to me. That’s just a fact. I don’t think anyone else has lived through precisely the set of circumstances I’ve lived through. And survived them, at any rate.”

— Gail Honeyman

52. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

66. “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

67. “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

68. “Things didn’t feel right; I hadn’t been able to relax yesterday, hadn’t been able to settle to anything. I just felt on edge, somehow. If my mood was a crossword clue, the answer would be “discombobulated.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

71. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

74. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

77. “No thank you,” I said. “I don’t want to accept a drink from you, because then I would be obliged to purchase one for you in return, and I’m afraid I’m simply not interested in spending two drinks’ worth of time with you.”

— Gail Honeyman

78. “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

79. “Emily Dickinson’s beautiful poem is called “Wild Nights – Wild Nights!” and combines two elements of which I am inordinately fond: punctuation, and the theme of finding, at long last, a soul mate.”

— Gail Honeyman

80. “The machinations of fate are often beyond human ken, and perhaps greater forces were at work here, throwing us into one another’s path in the unlikeliest of circumstances.”

— Gail Honeyman

81. “Silence sat between us, shivering with misery.”

— Gail Honeyman

82. “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

83. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

95. “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

96. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

98. “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

99. “A philosophical question: if a tree falls in a 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? I think that it is perfectly normal to talk to oneself occasionally. It’s not as though I’m expecting a reply. I’m fully aware that Polly is a houseplant.”

— Gail Honeyman

100. “I felt like a newly laid egg, all swishy and gloopy inside, and so fragile that the slightest pressure could break me.”

— Gail Honeyman