Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “She was, quite simply, a nice lady who’d raised a family and now lived quietly with her cats and grew vegetables. This was both nothing and everything.”

— Gail Honeyman

102. “Everything seems worse in the darkest hours of the night.”

— Gail Honeyman

103. “After the shampoo was rinsed away, the girl performed a ‘shiatsu head massage’. I have never known such bliss. She kneaded my scalp with firm tenderness and precision, and I felt the hairs stand up on my forearms, then a bolt of electricity run down my spine. It ended about nine hours before I would have liked it to.”

— Gail Honeyman

104. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

111. “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

112. “That said, I did sometimes wonder what it would be like to have someone – a cousin, say, or a sibling – to call on in times of need, or even just to spend unplanned time with. Someone who knows you, cares about you, who wants the best for you. A houseplant, however attractive and robust, doesn’t quite cut the mustard, unfortunately.”

— Gail Honeyman

113. “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

114. “I’m responsible. I chose to put myself in a situation where I’m responsible, wanting to look after her, a small, dependent, vulnerable creature. It’s innate and I don’t even have to think about it. It’s like breathing – for some people.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

116. “I had convinced myself that he was the one, that he would help to make me normal, fix the things that were wrong with my life.”

— Gail Honeyman

117. “He wasn’t using a knife, but held a fork in his right hand like a child or an American.”

— Gail Honeyman

118. “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.”

— Gail Honeyman

119. “They gave it to me, unloved, unwanted, irreparably damaged. Also the table.”

— Gail Honeyman

120. “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

121. “I took a breath. Back in that house, on a good day. Stripes of sunshine on the carpet, a board game set out on the floor, a pair of dice, two brightly colored counters. A day with more ladders than snakes.”

— Gail Honeyman

122. “I sat on my own and no one asked me to dance and I was absolutely fine with that.”

— Gail Honeyman

123. “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

124. “I was ready to rise from the ashes and be reborn.”

— Gail Honeyman

125. “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

126. “Popular people sometimes have to laugh at things they don’t find very funny, do things they don’t particularly want to, with people whose company they don’t particularly enjoy. Not me. I had decided, years ago, that if the choice was between that or flying solo, then I’d fly solo. It was safer that way. Grief is the price we pay for love, so they say. The price is far too high.”

— Gail Honeyman

127. “I was fine, perfectly fine on my own, but I needed to keep Mummy happy, keep her calm so she would leave me in peace. 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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “I’m nearly thirty years old now and I’ve been working here since I was twenty-one. Bob, the owner, took me on not long after the office opened. I suppose he felt sorry for me. I had a degree in Classics and no work experience to speak of, and I turned up for the interview with a black eye, a couple of missing teeth and a broken arm.”

— Gail Honeyman

132. “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

133. “The world just went on, regardless of what happened. That’s how it works.”

— Gail Honeyman

134. “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

135. “All of the people in the room seemed to take so much for granted: that they would be invited to social events, that they would have friends and family to talk to, that they would fall in love, be loved in return, perhaps create a family of their own.”

— Gail Honeyman

136. “Poor old soul,” he said. I nodded. Surprisingly, I felt an emotion that I recognized as anxiety or concern in relation to this elderly stranger.”

— Gail Honeyman

137. “Thank you for making me shiny.”

— Gail Honeyman

138. “It isn’t annoying, her need – it isn’t a burden. It’s a privilege. I’m responsible. I chose to put myself in a situation where I’m responsible. Wanting to look after her, a small, dependent, vulnerable creature, is innate, and I don’t even have to think about it. It’s like breathing.”

— Gail Honeyman

139. “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

140. “People say that when you come across “the one,” you just know.”

— Gail Honeyman

141. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

144. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

146. “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

147. “They were all right, I guess,” he said, shrugging. Such insight, such clear, descriptive prose. Bernadette piped up, as I knew she would, unable to resist an opportunity to draw attention to herself by any means available.”

— Gail Honeyman

148. “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

149. “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

150. “LOL could go and take a running jump. I wasn’t made for illiteracy; it simply didn’t come naturally.”

— Gail Honeyman