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

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.”

— Gail Honeyman

53. “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

54. “In the end, what matters is this: I survived.”

— Gail Honeyman

55. “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

56. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

58. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

60. “For heaven’s sake, please don’t trouble yourself by being proactive and pushing forward with it. Oh no, heaven forfend. Please – continue to do nothing. Go and sit in your empty little flat and watch television on your own, just like you do Every. Single. Night.”

— Gail Honeyman

61. “We waited at the pedestrian crossing, and he was silent at last. I watched an old man stagger down the opposite side of the road.”

— Gail Honeyman

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

67. “All of the seats already had an occupant, which meant I was going to have to position myself next to a stranger. In a different mood, I enjoyed this game: one had ten seconds to scan the occupants and select the slimmest, sanest, cleanest-looking person to sit next to.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

69. “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

70. “There are scars on my heart, just as thick, as disfiguring as those on my face. I know they’re there. I hope some undamaged tissue remains, a patch through which love can come in and flow out. I hope.”

— Gail Honeyman

71. “Life was so very precarious. I already knew that, of course. No one knew it better than me. I know, I know how ridiculous this is, how pathetic, but on some days, the very darkest days, knowing that the plant would die if I didn’t water it was the only thing that forced me up out of bed.”

— Gail Honeyman

72. “I’d been a bit silly. We weren’t going to be together. And he – well, it turned out that he wasn’t even right for me anyway. He wasn’t the man I thought he was. I felt sad about that, and I felt extremely stupid for getting it all so wrong.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

74. “I feel the need for green as a visceral longing.”

— Gail Honeyman

75. “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

76. “I marveled at the generosity of those humans who performed intimate services for others.”

— Gail Honeyman

77. “The streets were all named after poets – Wordsworth Lane, Shelley Close, Keats Rise – no doubt chosen by the building company’s marketing department. They were all poets that the kind of person who’d aspire to own such a home would recognize, poets who wrote about urns and flowers and wandering clouds. Based on past experience, I’d be more likely to end up living in Dante Lane or Poe Crescent.”

— Gail Honeyman

78. “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

79. “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

80. “Casey became slightly more animated. “Would you like a loyalty card?” she said. “Have five manicures and the sixth one’s free!” “No thank you,” I said. “I shan’t be having a manicure again. I can do the same thing myself at home, better, for nothing.”

— Gail Honeyman

81. “I was in a fast-food restaurant for the first time in my adult life, an enormous and garish place just around the corner from the music venue. It was mystifyingly, inexplicably busy. I wondered why humans would willingly queue at a counter to request processed food, then carry it to a table which was not even set, and then eat it from the paper? Afterward, despite having paid for it, the customer themselves are responsible for clearing away the detritus. Very strange.”

— Gail Honeyman

82. “This was an all too familiar social scenario for me; standing alone, staring into the middle of distance. It was absolutely fine. It was absolutely normal. After the fire, at each new school, 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.”

— Gail Honeyman

83. “No one had ever bought me lunch before. It was a very pleasant feeling, to have someone incur expenditure on my behalf, voluntarily, expecting nothing in return.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

85. “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

86. “It’s both good and bad how humans can learn to tolerate pretty much anything if they have to.”

— Gail Honeyman

87. “Her blond hair was – I grappled for the correct terms – both tall and fat, and tumbled well past her shoulders in glossy waves. Even Bobbi Brown might have thought the amount of makeup she was wearing de trop. Raymond’s mouth hung slightly open, just wide enough to post a letter through, and he seemed somewhat dazed. Laura appeared entirely indifferent to his response.”

— Gail Honeyman

88. “I’m not sure I’d like to be burned. I think I might like to be fed to zoo animals. It would be both environmentally friendly and a lovely treat for the larger carnivores. Could you request that?”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

90. “Then the beat changed abruptly and everyone started doing the same thing, making strange shapes with their arms above their head. It took me a moment or two to learn the shapes, and then I was able to copy them. Free-form jigging, communal shapes in the air; free-form jigging, communal shapes in the air. Dancing was easy!”

— Gail Honeyman

91. “Every meal should be an epicurean feast for the senses, she said, and one should go hungry rather than sully one’s palate with anything less than exquisite morsels.”

— Gail Honeyman

92. “Candles in a bathroom! I suspected that Laura was something of a sybarite.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

94. “The crematorium was a busy place and the parking spaces were needed, I supposed. I’m not sure I’d like to be burned. I think I might like to be fed to zoo animals. It would be both environmentally friendly and a lovely treat for the larger carnivores. Could you request that? I wondered. I made a mental note to write to the WWF in order to find out.”

— Gail Honeyman

95. “When I answered the door, he was holding a bottle of Irn-Bru and a bag of jelly babies.”

— Gail Honeyman

96. “There must be some people for whom difficult behaviour wasn’t a reason to end their relationship with you. if they liked you... they were prepared to maintain contact, even if you were sad, upset or behaving in very challenging ways.”

— Gail Honeyman

97. “Yes,” I said, smiling. He nodded, looked closely at me and then slowly smiled back. The moment hung in time like a drop of honey from a spoon, heavy, golden.”

— Gail Honeyman

98. “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

99. “I am naked, lying on the floor, looking at the underside of the table.”

— Gail Honeyman

100. “So what’s your happiest memory from before the fire?” she said. I thought hard. Several minutes went by. “I remember moments here and there, fragments, but I can’t think of a complete incident,” I said.”

— Gail Honeyman