Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

54. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

76. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “A semi-human bath sponge with protruding front teeth! On sale as if it were something completely unremarkable! For my entire life, people have said that I’m strange, but really, when I see things like this, I realize that I’m actually relatively normal.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

85. “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

86. “My first pal! Granted, he was a poorly turned out computer repairman with a range of unfortunate social habits, but still – pals! It had certainly taken me a long, long time to acquire one; I was well aware that people of my age usually had at least one or two friends.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

95. “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

96. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

98. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman