Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “Es igual de injusto desagradar a alguien por ser atractivo que por tener una deformidad.”

— Gail Honeyman

155. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

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. “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

170. “Every meal should be an epicurean feast for the senses, she said, and one should go hungry rather than sully one’s palate with anything less than exquisite morsels.”

— Gail Honeyman

171. “Candles in a bathroom! I suspected that Laura was something of a sybarite.”

— Gail Honeyman

172. “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?”

— Gail Honeyman

173. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

179. “There must be some people for whom difficult behaviour wasn’t a reason to end their relationship with you. if they liked you... they were prepared to maintain contact, even if you were sad, upset or behaving in very challenging ways.”

— Gail Honeyman

180. “We can all fight against loneliness by engaging in random acts of kindness.”

— Gail Honeyman

181. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

183. “So what’s your happiest memory from before the fire?” she said. I thought hard. Several minutes went by. “I remember moments here and there, fragments, but I can’t think of a complete incident,” I said.”

— Gail Honeyman

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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. When I feel like that, my head drops and my shoulders slump and I ache, I physically ache, for human contact – I truly feel that I might tumble to the ground and pass away if someone doesn’t hold me, touch me.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “I went to see Loretta, the office manager. She has overinflated ideas of her own administrative abilities, and in her spare time makes hideous jewelry, which she then sells to idiots.”

— Gail Honeyman

195. “Daringly, I didn’t put my name, because I realized he’d know it was from me.”

— Gail Honeyman

196. “There he was, a gift from the gods – handsome, elegant and talented. 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.”

— Gail Honeyman

197. “I did briefly consider taking up smoking,” I admitted, “but I thoroughly research all activities before commencement, and smoking did not in the end seem to me to be a viable or sensible pastime. It’s financially rebarbative too,” I said.”

— Gail Honeyman

198. “I realized that such small gestures – the way his mother had made me a cup of tea after our meal without asking, remembering that I didn’t take sugar, the way Laura had placed two little biscuits on the saucer when she brought me coffee in the salon – such things could mean so much. I wondered how it would feel to perform such simple deeds for other people.”

— Gail Honeyman

199. “There: soft fingers on vibrating steel, and a chord shimmered into the air, nebulous and milky, like light from an old, old star. A voice: warm and low and gentle, a voice to cast spells, charm snakes, shape the course of dreams.”

— 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