Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

206. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

208. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

232. “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

233. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

235. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

237. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

239. “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

240. “The lights were bright on him, and I was in darkness. But he would see me, nonetheless. If it was meant to be, and surely it was, then he would see me, the way I’d seen him, all those weeks ago.”

— Gail Honeyman

241. “I say it out loud, often: niamniamensis. It’s like kissing, the “m’s forcing your lips together, rolling over the consonants, your tongue poking into n’s and over the s’s.”

— Gail Honeyman

242. “You’re still of the view that you don’t want to know anything else about the incident, or about your mother, I understand?” No smiling this time. “That’s right,” I said. “There’s no need – I speak to her once a week, on a Wednesday evening, regular as clockwork.”

— Gail Honeyman

243. “None of his muscles were visible, and I suspect he only ever used the ones in his forearms with any degree of regularity.”

— Gail Honeyman

244. “Do you know much about music, then?” I asked, as we walked toward a pub which Raymond assured me was quiet – “A proper old man’s pub,” he said, whatever that was. “Eh, aye, I guess,” he said. “Wonderful,” I said. “Now please: tell me everything.”

— Gail Honeyman

245. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

247. “But it didn’t hurt – like noticing you had a stone in your shoe, but while you were sitting down rather than walking on it.”

— Gail Honeyman

248. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

250. “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