Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 3 of 9

101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

106. “Tiny slivers of life – they all added up and helped you to feel that you too could be a fragment, a little piece of humanity who usefully filled a space, however minuscule.”

— Gail Honeyman

107. “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

108. “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

109. “His eyes were light brown. They were light brown in the way that a rose is red, or that the sky is blue. They defined what it meant to be light brown.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “Anyway, a nice nurse came and spoke to me, and explained that people who truly love you don’t hurt you, and that it wasn’t right to stay with someone who did. The way she explained it, it all made sense. I should have been able to work it out for myself, really.”

— Gail Honeyman

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

121. “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

122. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

132. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “There was a certain pleasure in ceding control.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

141. “There was no hope, things couldn’t be put right. I couldn’t be put right. The past could neither be escaped nor undone. After all these weeks of delusion, I recognized, breathless, the pure, brutal truth of it.”

— Gail Honeyman

142. “You had a lucky escape with Mum and the photo albums this time, Eleanor,” Raymond said. “She’ll bore the pants off you next time about the grandkids, just you wait and see.” He was making a lot of assumptions there, I thought, but I let it pass.”

— Gail Honeyman

143. “So,” she went on, “there you were, quite enjoying your crush, feeling the feelings. Tell me, what happened to bring this to an end all of a sudden? What crushed the crush, as it were?”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

145. “Only this morning I’d been furious, and now I was calm and happy. I was gradually getting used to feeling the range of available human emotions, their intensity, the rapidity with which they could change. 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 understand that I needed, wanted, something more than that now.”

— Gail Honeyman

146. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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