Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “The streets were all named after poets – Wordsworth Lane, Shelley Close, Keats Rise – no doubt chosen by the building company’s marketing department. They were all poets that the kind of person who’d aspire to own such a home would recognize, poets who wrote about urns and flowers and wandering clouds. Based on past experience, I’d be more likely to end up living in Dante Lane or Poe Crescent.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

153. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

155. “I’d been pondering this, and concluded that there must be some people for whom difficult behaviour wasn’t a reason to end their relationship with you. If they liked you – and, I remembered, Raymond and I had agreed that we were pals now – then, it seemed, they were prepared to maintain contact, even if you were sad, or upset, or behaving in very challenging ways. This was something of a revelation.”

— Gail Honeyman

156. “The singer wasn’t ever the point, really; Maria Temple had helped me see that. In my eagerness to change, to connect with someone, I’d focused on the wrong thing, the wrong person.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

158. “I had to google “mofo” and must confess to being slightly alarmed by the result.”

— Gail Honeyman

159. “They choose things like plates, bowls and cutlery – I mean, what are they doing at the moment: shoveling food from packets into their mouths with their bare hands? I simply fail to see how the act of legally formalizing a human relationship necessitates friends, family and coworkers upgrading the contents of their kitchen for them.”

— Gail Honeyman

160. “I folded my pillow in half to support me as I sat up. Sleep still felt far away, and I was in need of soothing. I reached down into the gap between the mattress and the wall and sought my old faithful, its edges rounded and softened with years of handling. Jane Eyre. I could open up the novel at any page and immediately know where I was in the story, could almost visualize the next sentence before I reached it.”

— Gail Honeyman

161. “The words were incredibly sad, and, for an atheist like myself, entirely without hope or comfort, but still; it was our duty to sing them to the best of our ability, and to sing proudly, in honor of Sammy.”

— Gail Honeyman

162. “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

163. “Something different,” I said. “What would you suggest?” “How brave are you prepared to be, Eleanor?” Laura asked. This was the correct question. I am brave. I am brave, courageous, Eleanor Oliphant.”

— Gail Honeyman

164. “The bag I finally settled on was impractical, being far too small to carry, for example, either a hardback book or a bottle of Glen’s.”

— Gail Honeyman

165. “Unprompted, Raymond started to tell me about his mother, how he was going to visit her tomorrow, something he did every Sunday. She was a widow and not terribly well. She had a lot of cats, and he helped her care for them. On and on and on he droned. I interrupted him.”

— Gail Honeyman

166. “This was an all too familiar social scenario for me; standing alone, staring into the middle of distance. It was absolutely fine. It was absolutely normal. After the fire, at each new school, I’d tried so hard, but something about me just didn’t fit. There was, it seemed, no Eleanor-shaped social hole for me to slot into.”

— Gail Honeyman

167. “It’s both good and bad how humans can learn to tolerate pretty much anything if they have to.”

— Gail Honeyman

168. “Aye well – what is it that they say? – try everything once, except incest and morris dancing. Maybe we should add death metal to the list, eh?”

— Gail Honeyman

169. “Her blond hair was – I grappled for the correct terms – both tall and fat, and tumbled well past her shoulders in glossy waves. Even Bobbi Brown might have thought the amount of makeup she was wearing de trop. Raymond’s mouth hung slightly open, just wide enough to post a letter through, and he seemed somewhat dazed. Laura appeared entirely indifferent to his response.”

— Gail Honeyman

170. “There was nothing to tempt me from the choice of desserts, so I opted instead for a coffee, which was bitter and lukewarm. Naturally, I had been about to pour it all over myself but, just in time, had read the warning printed on the paper cup, alerting me to the fact that hot liquids can cause injury. A lucky escape, Eleanor! I said to myself, laughing quietly. I began to suspect that Mr. McDonald was a very foolish man indeed, although, judging from the undiminished queue, a wealthy one.”

— Gail Honeyman

171. “All you hear these days is that everything’s going to hell in a handcart, how everybody’s a pedophile or a crook, and it’s not true. You forget that the world is full of ordinary decent people like yourselves, Good Samaritans who’ll stop and help a soul in need.”

— Gail Honeyman

172. “These magazines could tell me which clothes and shoes to wear, how to have my hair styled in order to fit in. They could show me the right kind of makeup to buy and how to apply it. This way, I would disappear into everywoman acceptability. I would not be stared at. The goal, ultimately, was successful camouflage as a human woman.”

— Gail Honeyman

173. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

176. “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

177. “I suppose even Raymond would think it inappropriate to smoke a cigarette outside a crematorium.”

— Gail Honeyman

178. “Did men ever look in the mirror, I wondered, and find themselves wanting in deeply fundamental ways?”

— Gail Honeyman

179. “I took a deep breath, picked up the pouf and squashed it into a bin liner. It was quite a fight to get it in. As I grappled with it, I thought about what I must look like, my arms wrapped around a giant frog, wrestling it to the ground. I snorted a bit, and then I laughed and laughed until my chest hurt.”

— Gail Honeyman

180. “What, I wondered, was the point of me?”

— Gail Honeyman

181. “All of the seats already had an occupant, which meant I was going to have to position myself next to a stranger. In a different mood, I enjoyed this game: one had ten seconds to scan the occupants and select the slimmest, sanest, cleanest-looking person to sit next to.”

— Gail Honeyman

182. “In my recent experience, the perfect man appears when you’re least expecting it. Fate throws him into your path, and then providence ensures that you will end up together.”

— Gail Honeyman

183. “Did men ever look in the mirror, I wondered, and find themselves wanting in deeply fundamental ways? When they opened a newspaper or watched a film, were they presented with nothing but exceptionally handsome young men, and did this make them feel intimidated, inferior, because they were not as young, not as handsome? Did they then read newspaper articles ridiculing those same handsome men if they gained weight or wore something unflattering?”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

186. “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

187. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

189. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

191. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

193. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

197. “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

198. “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

199. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman