Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Finding out more about him was the right thing to do, the sensible approach, if it turned out that he was going to be the love of my life.”

— Gail Honeyman

202. “I’d learned that money was something to worry about, to ration.”

— Gail Honeyman

203. “I was on the horns of a dilemma; there seemed little point in traveling to hospital to see a comatose stranger and drop off some fizzy pop at his bedside. On the other hand, it would be interesting to experience being a hospital visitor, and there was always an outside chance that he might wake up when I was there. He had rather seemed to enjoy my monologue while we were waiting for the ambulance; well, insofar as I could tell, given that he was unconscious.”

— Gail Honeyman

204. “The minister, looking pleased with himself, said that they’d stitched a happy life together after.”

— Gail Honeyman

205. “A cultured man. How much we had in common!”

— Gail Honeyman

206. “My preference is for fodder that is cheap, quick and simple to procure and prepare, whilst providing the requisite nutrients to enable a person to stay alive.”

— Gail Honeyman

207. “That’s all you ever want for your kids: for them to be happy.”

— Gail Honeyman

208. “I’ve noticed that most Scottish people don’t inquire beyond “down south,” and I can only assume that this description encapsulates some sort of generic Englandshire for them, boat races and bowler hats, as though Liverpool and Cornwall were the same sorts of places, inhabited by the same sorts of people. Conversely, they are always adamant that every part of their own country is unique and special. I’m not sure why.”

— Gail Honeyman

209. “I was homeschooled after that.”

— Gail Honeyman

210. “Was I alive? I hoped so, but only because if this was the location of the afterlife, I’d be lodging an appeal immediately.”

— Gail Honeyman

211. “I was ready to rise from the ashes and be reborn.”

— Gail Honeyman

212. “You never think about the people that are left behind to deal with the aftermath of it all.”

— Gail Honeyman

213. “She had tried to steer me towards vertiginous heels again – why are these people so incredibly keen on crippling their female customers? I began to wonder if cobblers and chiropractors had established some fiendish cartel.”

— Gail Honeyman

214. “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

215. “I could not solve the puzzle of me.”

— Gail Honeyman

216. “Families came and went, and the whole place felt temporary, somehow, like theatrical scenery that had been hastily assembled and could be shifted at any time.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

218. “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. I felt despair and nausea mingled inside me, and then that familiar black, black mood came down first.”

— Gail Honeyman

219. “I decided to clean the flat from top to bottom. I saw how grubby it was, how tired, It looked like I felt – unloved, uncared for.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

221. “Perhaps that was what pampering meant, though – literally, not having to lift a finger.”

— Gail Honeyman

222. “Raymond was looking at me. “I’m going to my mum’s now,” he said.”

— Gail Honeyman

223. “I stared at her. The imbalance in the extent of our knowledge of each other was manifestly unfair. Social workers should present their new clients with a fact sheet about themselves to try to redress this, I think. After all, she’d had unrestricted access to that big brown folder, the bumper book of Eleanor, two decades’ worth of information about the intimate minutiae of my life. All I knew about her was her name and her employer.”

— Gail Honeyman

224. “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

225. “It’s as unfair to dislike someone because they’re attractive as it is to dislike someone because of a deformity.”

— Gail Honeyman

226. “He sings in the way that a bird sings; his music is a sweet, natural thing that comes like rain, like sunlight, something that, perfectly, just is.”

— Gail Honeyman

227. “The musician! How blessed.”

— Gail Honeyman

228. “His social skills were woefully inadequate, especially for a people-facing job like his.”

— Gail Honeyman

229. “The strange thing – something I’d never expected – was that it actually made you feel better when someone put their arm around you, held you close. Why? Was it some mammalian thing, this need for human contact? He was warm and solid. I could smell his deodorant, and the detergent he used to wash his clothes – over both scents there lay a faint patina of cigarettes. A Raymond smell. I leaned in closer.”

— Gail Honeyman

230. “When did people become embarrassed to sing in public? Was it because of the decline in churchgoing? And yet the television schedule was full of singing contests in which people, however untalented, were far from shy about participating.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

233. “We walked in silence, the kind that you didn’t feel the need to fill.”

— Gail Honeyman

234. “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

235. “Laura’s house was at the end of a neat cul-de-sac of small, modern houses. There were several cars in the driveway. We approached the front door and I noticed that she had red geraniums in window boxes. I find geraniums somewhat unsettling; that rich, sticky scent when you brush against them, a brackish, vegetable smell that’s the opposite of floral.”

— Gail Honeyman

236. “He is a spectacularly unsophisticated conversationalist.”

— Gail Honeyman

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

244. “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

245. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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