Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

59. “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

60. “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

61. “Ignis aurum probat. “Fire tests gold.”

— Gail Honeyman

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “Whilst I am neither stylish nor fashionable, I am always clean; that way, at least, I can hold my head up when I take my place, however unexalted, in the world.”

— Gail Honeyman

70. “I am not generally a wearer of perfume, preferring to smell of plain soap and my natural musk, but, were it possible to purchase a bottle in which the scent of new pencil shavings and the petroleum reek of a freshly rubbed eraser were combined, I would happily douse myself with it on a daily basis.”

— Gail Honeyman

71. “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

72. “How much of your life do you think you’ve wasted queuing for the bogs?” she asked, conversationally.”

— Gail Honeyman

73. “I find lateness exceptionally rude; it’s so disrespectful, implying unambiguously that you consider yourself and your own time to be so much more valuable than the other person’s.”

— Gail Honeyman

74. “Human mating rituals are unbelievably tedious to observe. At least in the animal kingdom you are occasionally treated to a flash of bright feathers or a display of spectacular violence. Hair flicking and play fights don’t quite cut the mustard.”

— Gail Honeyman

75. “He wasn’t mad. He just didn’t have any socks on.”

— Gail Honeyman

76. “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. It’s not a comforting thought. In fact, if I thought about it for long enough, I’d probably want to pluck out my own eyes, to stop looking, to stop seeing all the time. The things I’ve seen cannot be unseen. The things I’ve done cannot be undone.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

78. “A volte basta soltanto una persona gentile seduta al tuo fianco mentre affronti le cose.”

— Gail Honeyman

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “If I can’t be a corpse, then I wish hat I was a baby, curled up in some other woman’s womb, pure and longed for.”

— Gail Honeyman

84. “You’ve made me shiny, Laura,” I said. I tried to stop it, but a little tear ran down the side of my nose. I wiped it away with the back of my hand before it could dampen the ends of my new hair. “Thank you for making me shiny.”

— Gail Honeyman

85. “I allowed my mind to wander. I’ve found this to be a very effective way of passing the time; you take a situation or a person and start to imagine nice things that might happen. You can make anything happen, anything at all, inside a daydream.”

— Gail Honeyman

86. “In primary school, sports day was the one day of the year when the less academically gifted students could triumph... 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

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

— Gail Honeyman

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “There is such a paucity of good manners on display in the so-called service sector!”

— Gail Honeyman

93. “Life sparkled towards me through the drops of rain on glass, shimmered fragrantly above the fug of wet clothes and damp feet.”

— Gail Honeyman

94. “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

95. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

97. “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

98. “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

99. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman