Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Life sparkled towards me through the drops of rain on glass, shimmered fragrantly above the fug of wet clothes and damp feet.”

— Gail Honeyman

102. “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. “Raymond,” I said, “you can’t know how much it means to me, to have a friend – a genuine, caring friend.”

— Gail Honeyman

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “She was writing in her notebook, and looked up. “Did you ever wish you had a father, or a father figure in your life, Eleanor? Was it something that you missed?” I stared at my hands. It was difficult, talking openly about these things, dragging them out for inspection when they’d been perfectly fine as they were, hidden away.”

— Gail Honeyman

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

119. “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

120. “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

121. “The shop floor was vast, and I decided to request assistance. The first woman I saw was matronly, and did not seem well placed to dispense fashion advice. The second was in her late teens or early twenties, and therefore too callow to advise me. The third, in the manner of Goldilocks, was just right – around my age, well groomed, sensible-looking. I approached with caution.”

— Gail Honeyman

122. “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

123. “Suffering other people’s unkindness must be difficult too; all those bitter, less attractive people, jealous and resentful of your beauty. That’s incredibly unfair of them. After all, beautiful people didn’t ask to be born that way. It’s as unfair to dislike someone because they’re attractive as it is to dislike someone because of a deformity.”

— Gail Honeyman

124. “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

125. “I bought some cat food for Glen on the way home. The thing about Glen is that, despite her offhand manner, she loves me. I know she’s only a cat. But it’s still love; animals, people. It’s unconditional, and it’s both the easiest and the hardest thing in the world.”

— Gail Honeyman

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

129. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “Your voice changes when you’re smiling, it alters the sound somehow.”

— Gail Honeyman

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

140. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

147. “He had the look of a gazelle or an impala, one of those boring beige animals with large, round eyes on the side of its face. The kind of animal that always gets eaten by a leopard in the end.”

— Gail Honeyman

148. “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. How would I celebrate my own fortieth birthday? I wondered. I hoped I would have people in my life to mark the occasion when the time came.”

— Gail Honeyman

149. “The goal, ultimately, was successful camouflage as a human woman.”

— Gail Honeyman

150. “I feel sorry for beautiful people. Beauty, from the moment you possess it, is already slipping away, ephemeral. That must be difficult.”

— Gail Honeyman