Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

153. “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

154. “I have yet to find a genre of music I enjoy; it’s basically audible physics, waves and energized particles, and, like most sane people, I have no interest in physics. It therefore struck me as bizarre that I was humming a tune from Oliver! I mentally added the exclamation mark, which, for the first time ever, was appropriate.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

166. “You can’t protect other people, however hard you try.”

— Gail Honeyman

167. “Sport is a mystery to me. In primary school, sports day was the one day of the year when the less academically gifted students could triumph, winning prizes for jumping fastest in a sack, or running from Point A to Point B more quickly than their classmates. How they loved to wear those badges on their blazers the next day! 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

168. “A human hand was exactly the right weight, exactly the right temperature for touching another person, I realized.”

— Gail Honeyman

169. “It turned out that if you saw the same person with some degree of regularity, then the conversation was immediately pleasant and comfortable – you could pick up where you left off, as it were, rather than having to start afresh each time.”

— Gail Honeyman

170. “Danny left, Eleanor,” she said, not looking up from her screen. “There’s a new guy now. Raymond Gibbons? He started last month?”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

172. “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

173. “Sexual union between lovers should be a sacred, private thing.”

— Gail Honeyman

174. “After a minute or two, someone knocked tentatively on the living room door, and a face peeped round – Raymond.”

— Gail Honeyman

175. “You can’t have too much dog in a book.”

— Gail Honeyman

176. “I saw him bend down to light the cigarette of a woman in a wheelchair – she’d brought her drip out with her, on wheels, so that she could destroy her health at the same time as taxpayers’ money was being used to try and restore.”

— Gail Honeyman

177. “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?” I shook my head, but said nothing. “Oh, they do – I know they do. Remember how you got them, Eleanor. Was it worth it? For her? Oh, there’s room on your other cheek for a bit more hurt, isn’t there? Turn the other cheek for Mummy, Eleanor, there’s a good girl.”

— Gail Honeyman

178. “She was always telling us we had to be on the lookout for someone who was good enough.” I shook my head. “I suppose that’s how I ended up here,” I said. “Trying to find someone like that, and then getting confused and making a giant mess of everything.”

— Gail Honeyman

179. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

181. “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

182. “What was a muse, anyway? I was familiar with the classical allusion, of course, but in modern-day, practical terms, a muse seemed simply to be an attractive woman whom the artist wanted to sleep with.”

— Gail Honeyman

183. “It takes a long time to learn to live with loss, assuming you ever manage it.”

— Gail Honeyman

184. “My hair was mousy brown, parted in the center, straight and not particularly thick. Human hair, doing what human hair does: growing on my head.”

— Gail Honeyman

185. “During the next free-form jigging section, I started to wonder why the band was singing about, presumably, the Young Men’s Christian Association, but then, from my very limited exposure to popular music, people did seem to sing about umbrellas and fire-starting and Emily Bronte novels, so, I supposed, why not a gender- and faith-based youth organization?”

— Gail Honeyman

186. “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

187. “I took one of my hands in the other, tried to imagine what it would feel like if it was another person’s hand holding mine. There have been times when I felt that I might die of loneliness. People sometimes say they might die of boredom, that they’re dying for a cup of tea, but for me, dying of loneliness is not hyperbole.”

— Gail Honeyman

188. “Social interaction, it appeared, was surprisingly expensive.”

— Gail Honeyman

189. “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

190. “I decided to take my time getting ready, and looked cautiously at myself in the mirror while the shower warmed up. Could I ever become a musician’s muse? I wondered. What was a muse, anyway? I was familiar with the classical allusion, of course, but, in modern-day, practical terms, a muse seemed simply to be an attractive woman whom the artist wanted to sleep with.”

— Gail Honeyman

191. “I’d been pondering this, and concluded that there must be some people for whom difficult behavior wasn’t a reason to end their relationship with you.”

— Gail Honeyman

192. “The jeans looked too small but, miraculously, they stretched around me and I was able to fasten them. The top was loose, with a high neck. I felt appropriately covered up, if nothing else, although I couldn’t see the cutout section at the back. I looked exactly like everyone else. I supposed that was the point.”

— Gail Honeyman

193. “He loped off with a strange bouncy walk, springing too hard on the balls of his feet. A lot of unattractive men seem to walk in such a manner, I’ve noticed.”

— Gail Honeyman

194. “She certainly seems to have a life, not just an existence.”

— Gail Honeyman

195. “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?”

— Gail Honeyman

196. “His bare ankles looked distressingly white above his oxblood leather brogues, which he had teamed with green jogging bottoms. A madman.”

— Gail Honeyman

197. “You shouldn’t give yourself a hard time for not having a ten-year career plan.”

— Gail Honeyman

198. “But enough of me,” she said, the jagged edge in her voice hardening. “I want to hear about you. What are your plans for the weekend? Are you going out dancing, perhaps? Has an admirer asked you on a date?” Such venom. I tried to ignore.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

200. “Men like Raymond, pedestrial dullards, would always be distracted by women who looked like her, having neither the wit nor the sophistication to see beyond mammaries and peroxide.”

— Gail Honeyman