Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “How much of your life do you think you’ve wasted queuing for the bogs?” she asked, conversationally.”

— Gail Honeyman

202. “He is a spectacularly unsophisticated conversationalist.”

— Gail Honeyman

203. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

205. “Eleanor Oliphant? June Mullen, Social Work,” she said, stepping forward, her progress blocked by the door. “I was expecting Heather,” I said, peering around.”

— Gail Honeyman

206. “For my twenty-first birthday gift, he therefore punched me in the kidneys, kicked me as I lay on the floor until I passed out and then gave me a black eye when I came round, for “withholding information.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

208. “The slow noise of the scissors slicing through it was like the sound of embers shifting in a fire: tinkly, dangerous.”

— Gail Honeyman

209. “Some people, weak people, fear solitude.”

— Gail Honeyman

210. “I find lateness exceptionally rude; it’s so disrespectful, implying unambiguously that you consider yourself and your own time to be so much more valuable than the other person’s.”

— Gail Honeyman

211. “Human mating rituals are unbelievably tedious to observe. At least in the animal kingdom you are occasionally treated to a flash of bright feathers or a display of spectacular violence. Hair flicking and play fights don’t quite cut the mustard.”

— Gail Honeyman

212. “I’d only been offered a choice of tea or coffee. I wondered why hair salons didn’t provide anything stronger.”

— Gail Honeyman

213. “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

214. “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

215. “Budgeting is a skill, and a very useful one at that – after all, if I were to run out of funds, find myself indebted, there is no one, not a single soul, on whom I could call to bail me out. I’d be destitute. I.”

— Gail Honeyman

216. “I looked around, wondering what time it was, and whether they would have burned Sammy by now, or whether they kept all the bodies back till the end of the day to get a really good blaze going.”

— Gail Honeyman

217. “After the fire, I never managed to find anyone who could fit the spaces that had been created inside me.”

— Gail Honeyman

218. “Good-bye, Mummy,” I said. The last word. My voice was firm, measured, certain. I wasn’t sad. I was sure. And, underneath it all, like an embryo forming – tiny, so tiny, barely a cluster of cells, the heartbeat as small as the head of a pin, there I was. Eleanor Oliphant.”

— Gail Honeyman

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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.”

— Gail Honeyman

222. “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

223. “Eleanor. However hard you try to walk away from that fact, you can’t, darling, you simply can’t. It isn’t possible to destroy a bond that strong.”

— Gail Honeyman

224. “Danny left, Eleanor,’ she said, not looking up from her screen. ‘There’s a new guy now. Raymond Gibbons? He started last month?’ She said this as though I should have known. Still not looking up, she wrote his full name and telephone extension on a Post-it note and handed it to me.”

— Gail Honeyman

225. “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

226. “A daughter’s relationship with her father can sometimes influence her subsequent relationships with men. Do you have any thoughts about that, Eleanor?”

— Gail Honeyman

227. “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

228. “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

229. “If I’m ever unsure as to the correct course of action, I’ll think, “What would a ferret do?”

— Gail Honeyman

230. “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

231. “I had no idea what it was, but I realized that I’d happily sit here in the warmth with him and watch a golf programme if that was all there was.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

233. “I needed to make something happen, anything. I couldn’t keep passing through life, over it, under it, around it. I couldn’t go on haunting the world like a wraith.”

— Gail Honeyman

234. “He took out a beautifully battered leather wallet and paid with a credit card, although I noted that the total sum was less than eight pounds. I expect, rather like a member of the royal family, that he is simply too important to carry cash.”

— Gail Honeyman

235. “Which way are you going, Eleanor?” he asked. I considered the best response to this question. I was heading home for an exciting rendezvous. This highly unusual occasion – an appointment with a visitor to my home – meant that I needed to curtail this tedious, unplanned interaction posthaste.”

— Gail Honeyman

236. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

238. “This way, I would disappear into everywoman acceptability. I would not be stared at.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

240. “I do exist, don’t I? It often feels as if I’m not here, that I’m a figment of my own imagination.”

— Gail Honeyman

241. “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

242. “I had done such things in the past, tried to be kind, tried to take care, I knew that I had, but that was before.”

— Gail Honeyman

243. “It was hardly surprising that my mother had become institutionalized – that, one assumed, was a given, considering the nature of her crime – but she had gone far, far further than necessary by occasionally adopting the accent and argot of the places where she has been detained.”

— Gail Honeyman

244. “He looked closely at me. “What happened to your face? You don’t” – he leaned forward quickly, touched my arm over the blanket – “you definitely don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I’m just being a nosy bastard!”

— Gail Honeyman

245. “No thank you,” I said. “I don’t want to accept a drink from you, because then I would be obliged to purchase one for you in return, and I’m afraid I’m simply not interested in spending two drinks’ worth of time with you.”

— Gail Honeyman

246. “But, by careful observation from the sidelines, 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. 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.”

— Gail Honeyman

247. “What, I wondered, was the point of me? I contributed nothing to the world, absolutely nothing, and I took nothing from it either. When I ceased to exist, it would make no material difference to anyone. Most people’s absence from the world would be felt on a personal level by at least a handful of people. I, however, had no one. I do not light up a room when I walk into it. No one longs to see me or to hear my voice.”

— Gail Honeyman

248. “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

249. “My eye was drawn to a bright green hue, the same shade as a poisonous Amazonian frog, the tiny, delightfully deadly ones.”

— Gail Honeyman

250. “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.”

— Gail Honeyman