Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Go to Bobbi Brown, tell them Claire sent you.”

— Gail Honeyman

152. “There is categorically no need for eye contact when the person concerned is wielding sharp implements.”

— Gail Honeyman

153. “Why him? Why now? On Monday morning, waiting at the bus stop, I tried to work it out. It was a tricky one. Who can understand the workings of fate, after all? Far greater minds than mine had tried and failed, to arrive at a conclusion.”

— Gail Honeyman

154. “He seemed very out of breath, placed both items gently on my hall carpet without being asked, and started to take off his jacket, still puffing and blowing like a beached porpoise. Smoking kills.”

— Gail Honeyman

155. “A philosophical question: if a tree falls in the 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?”

— Gail Honeyman

156. “I do exist, don’t I? It often feels as if I’m not here, that I’m a figment of my own imagination. There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I’d lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock.”

— Gail Honeyman

157. “I’d tried to cope alone for far too long, and it hadn’t done me any good at all. Sometimes you simply needed someone kind to sit with you while you dealt with things.”

— Gail Honeyman

158. “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

159. “He had his hands in the pockets of his low-slung denim trousers, and was wearing a strange, oversized woolen hat that I hadn’t seen before. It looked like the kind of hat that a German goblin might wear in an illustration from a nineteenth-century fairy tale, possibly one about a baker who was unkind to children and got his comeuppance via an elfin horde. I rather liked it.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

161. “Finding out more about him was the right thing to do, the sensible approach, if it turned out that he was going to be the love of my life.”

— Gail Honeyman

162. “I’d learned that money was something to worry about, to ration.”

— Gail Honeyman

163. “I was on the horns of a dilemma; there seemed little point in traveling to hospital to see a comatose stranger and drop off some fizzy pop at his bedside. On the other hand, it would be interesting to experience being a hospital visitor, and there was always an outside chance that he might wake up when I was there. He had rather seemed to enjoy my monologue while we were waiting for the ambulance; well, insofar as I could tell, given that he was unconscious.”

— Gail Honeyman

164. “The minister, looking pleased with himself, said that they’d stitched a happy life together after.”

— Gail Honeyman

165. “A cultured man. How much we had in common!”

— Gail Honeyman

166. “My preference is for fodder that is cheap, quick and simple to procure and prepare, whilst providing the requisite nutrients to enable a person to stay alive.”

— Gail Honeyman

167. “That’s all you ever want for your kids: for them to be happy.”

— Gail Honeyman

168. “I’ve noticed that most Scottish people don’t inquire beyond “down south,” and I can only assume that this description encapsulates some sort of generic Englandshire for them, boat races and bowler hats, as though Liverpool and Cornwall were the same sorts of places, inhabited by the same sorts of people. Conversely, they are always adamant that every part of their own country is unique and special. I’m not sure why.”

— Gail Honeyman

169. “Tell me, are you courting at the moment, Eleanor?” she asked. How tedious. “Not presently,” I said, “but I have my eye on someone. It’s only a matter of time.” There was a crash from the sink as Raymond dropped the ladle onto the draining board with a clatter. “Raymond!” his mum said. “Butterfingers!”

— Gail Honeyman

170. “I was homeschooled after that.”

— Gail Honeyman

171. “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

172. “Was I alive? I hoped so, but only because if this was the location of the afterlife, I’d be lodging an appeal immediately.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

174. “You never think about the people that are left behind to deal with the aftermath of it all.”

— Gail Honeyman

175. “She had tried to steer me towards vertiginous heels again – why are these people so incredibly keen on crippling their female customers? I began to wonder if cobblers and chiropractors had established some fiendish cartel.”

— Gail Honeyman

176. “It’s SpongeBob, Eleanor,” he said, speaking very slowly and clearly as though I were some sort of idiot. “SpongeBob SquarePants?” 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

177. “I could not solve the puzzle of me.”

— Gail Honeyman

178. “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

179. “Families came and went, and the whole place felt temporary, somehow, like theatrical scenery that had been hastily assembled and could be shifted at any time.”

— Gail Honeyman

180. “Eleanor Oliphant, sole survivor – that’s me.”

— Gail Honeyman

181. “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. I felt despair and nausea mingled inside me, and then that familiar black, black mood came down first.”

— Gail Honeyman

182. “I decided to clean the flat from top to bottom. I saw how grubby it was, how tired, It looked like I felt – unloved, uncared for.”

— Gail Honeyman

183. “It’s Mr. Rochester who gets burned in the end. I know how that feels. All of it.”

— Gail Honeyman

184. “Perhaps that was what pampering meant, though – literally, not having to lift a finger.”

— Gail Honeyman

185. “Raymond was looking at me. “I’m going to my mum’s now,” he said.”

— Gail Honeyman

186. “I stared at her. The imbalance in the extent of our knowledge of each other was manifestly unfair. Social workers should present their new clients with a fact sheet about themselves to try to redress this, I think. After all, she’d had unrestricted access to that big brown folder, the bumper book of Eleanor, two decades’ worth of information about the intimate minutiae of my life. All I knew about her was her name and her employer.”

— Gail Honeyman

187. “It made me feel anxious when he went quiet. I suspected it meant he was either very sad, or, perhaps more worryingly, that he was very happy. A new girlfriend?”

— Gail Honeyman

188. “It’s as unfair to dislike someone because they’re attractive as it is to dislike someone because of a deformity.”

— Gail Honeyman

189. “He sings in the way that a bird sings; his music is a sweet, natural thing that comes like rain, like sunlight, something that, perfectly, just is.”

— Gail Honeyman

190. “The musician! How blessed.”

— Gail Honeyman

191. “His social skills were woefully inadequate, especially for a people-facing job like his.”

— Gail Honeyman

192. “The strange thing – something I’d never expected – was that it actually made you feel better when someone put their arm around you, held you close. Why? Was it some mammalian thing, this need for human contact? He was warm and solid. I could smell his deodorant, and the detergent he used to wash his clothes – over both scents there lay a faint patina of cigarettes. A Raymond smell. I leaned in closer.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

194. “When did people become embarrassed to sing in public? Was it because of the decline in churchgoing? And yet the television schedule was full of singing contests in which people, however untalented, were far from shy about participating.”

— Gail Honeyman

195. “The only criterion I have is that the books must look clean, which means that I have to disregard a lot of potential reading material in the charity shop. I don’t use the library for the same reason, althought obviously, in principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder.”

— Gail Honeyman

196. “Why is it that client-facing jobs hold such allure for misanthropes?”

— Gail Honeyman

197. “It struck me that, in the nicest possible way, she didn’t really have a personality. She was a mother.”

— Gail Honeyman

198. “We walked in silence, the kind that you didn’t feel the need to fill.”

— Gail Honeyman

199. “All of us – and especially young children – need to know that we’re loved, valued, accepted and understood... I said nothing. This was news to me. I let it settle. It sounded plausible, but it was a concept I’d need to consider at more length in the privacy of my own home.”

— Gail Honeyman

200. “Laura’s house was at the end of a neat cul-de-sac of small, modern houses. There were several cars in the driveway. We approached the front door and I noticed that she had red geraniums in window boxes. I find geraniums somewhat unsettling; that rich, sticky scent when you brush against them, a brackish, vegetable smell that’s the opposite of floral.”

— Gail Honeyman