Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Her home was so... shiny. She was shiny too, her skin, her hair, her shoes, her teeth. I hadn’t even realized before; I am matte, dull and scuffed.”

— Gail Honeyman

202. “Whatever Raymond was eating smelled disgusting, like gently reheated vomit.”

— Gail Honeyman

203. “I have always enjoyed reading, but I’ve never been sure how to select appropriate material. There are so many books in the world – how do you tell them all apart? How do you know which one will match your tastes and interests?”

— Gail Honeyman

204. “I’d worked out that social success is often built on pretending just a little. 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.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

206. “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

207. “I felt the heat where his hand had been; it was only a moment, but it left a warm imprint, almost as though it might be visible. A human hand was exactly the right weight, exactly the right temperature for touching another person, I realized.”

— Gail Honeyman

208. “I understood that assisted conception was the antithesis of careless, spontaneous or unplanned parenthood, that it was the most deliberate of decisions, undertaken only by women who were serious and dedicated in their quest to be mothers.”

— Gail Honeyman

209. “The thing is, even after everything that she’s done, after all of it, she’s still my mummy. She’s the only one I’ve got.”

— Gail Honeyman

210. “He held up a packet of organic curly kale. “What the hell is this?” he said, incredulous. Zinc, I whispered to myself. Raymond hustled me out of the.”

— Gail Honeyman

211. “Raymond rang the doorbell – the chime played the opening chords to Beethoven’s Third Symphony. A very small boy, his face smeared with, one hoped, chocolate, answered and stared at us. I stared back at him. Raymond stepped forward. “All right, mate?” he said. “We’re here to see your granddad.” The boy continued staring at us, somewhat unenthusiastically. “I’m wearing new shoes,” he stated, apropos of nothing. At that moment, Laura appeared behind him in the hallway.”

— Gail Honeyman

212. “I do understand that some people think waste is wrong, and, after careful reflection, I tend to agree. But I’d been brought up to think very differently; Mummy always said that only peasants and grubby little worker ants worried about such trivial things.”

— Gail Honeyman

213. “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

214. “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

215. “As always, Mummy was scary. But the thing was, this time – for the first time ever – she’d actually sounded scared too.”

— Gail Honeyman

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

223. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

225. “I feel like a spy or something,” said Raymond, looking at the sealed envelope that lay between us. “You’re completely unsuited to a career in espionage,” I told him. He raised his eyebrows. “Your face is too honest,” I said, and he smiled.”

— Gail Honeyman

226. “Social interaction, it appeared, was surprisingly expensive – the travel, the clothes, the drinks, the lunches, the gifts. Sometimes it evened out in the end – like with the drinks – but, I was finding out, more often than not, one incurred a net financial loss.”

— Gail Honeyman

227. “He had a heart attack not long after I started uni,” he explained to me. “Never got to enjoy his retirement,” his mother said. “It often happens that way.” They both sat quietly for a moment. “What did he do for a living?” I asked. I wasn’t interested, but I felt it was appropriate. “Gas engineer,” Raymond said.”

— Gail Honeyman

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

246. “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

247. “I put my hands to my ears, unable to believe what I was hearing. Without exaggeration, it could only be described as the cacophonous din of hell.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

250. “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