Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “They gave it to me, unloved, unwanted, irreparably damaged. Also the table.”

— Gail Honeyman

252. “There was no living thing in the universe that was more alone than me. Or more terrible.”

— Gail Honeyman

253. “Before and after the fire. One day I was breakfasting on watermelon, feta and pomegranate seeds, the next I was eating toasted Mother’s Pride smeared with margarine. That’s the story Mummy told me, at any rate.”

— Gail Honeyman

254. “If I could perform scansion on the Aeneid, if I could build a macro in an Excel spreadsheet, if I could spend the last nine birthdays and Christmases and New Year’s Eves alone, then I’m sure I could manage to organize a delightful festive lunch for thirty people on a budget of ten pounds per capita.”

— Gail Honeyman

255. “Are you talking about my face?” I said. “No, silly, your scar. Your face is lovely. You’ve got very clear skin, you know.”

— Gail Honeyman

256. “I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. There was throbbing pain and the beginnings of an itch downstairs. Perhaps I should have put my underpants back on.”

— Gail Honeyman

257. “I wondered, however, whether I might be better off waiting to see what happened at the gig before taking things to an epistolary level. There was no need to be reckless.”

— Gail Honeyman

258. “Your voice changes when you’re smiling, it alters the sound somehow.”

— Gail Honeyman

259. “I was a human woman, no more and no less.”

— Gail Honeyman

260. “However much you loved someone, it wasn’t always enough. Love alone couldn’t keep them safe...”

— Gail Honeyman

261. “The barman was well over six feet tall and had created strange, enormous holes in his earlobes by inserting little black plastic circles in order to push back the skin. For some reason, I was reminded of my shower curtain.”

— Gail Honeyman

262. “All of these seemed strange activities to impose on young people with no interest in them, and indeed I’m certain that they merely served to alienate the majority of us from physical activity for life.”

— Gail Honeyman

263. “Social interaction, it appeared, was surprisingly expensive.”

— Gail Honeyman

264. “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

265. “Eleanor,” he said, “why don’t you give me a call in a bit, and maybe you could bring his stuff over to him?”

— Gail Honeyman

266. “I’m so sorry.” We both spoke the words at exactly the same time. We tried again, and the same thing happened. Suddenly, I laughed, and he did too. Short bursts, at first, and then for longer. It was proper, genuine laughter, the kind that makes your whole body shake. My mouth was wide open, my breath slightly wheezy, my eyes shut tight. I felt vulnerable, and yet very relaxed and comfortable. I imagined that vomiting or going to the lavatory in front of him would feel the same way.”

— Gail Honeyman

267. “I had hair, ears, eyes and a mouth. I was a human woman, no more and no less.”

— Gail Honeyman

268. “I’m not really sure I know any normal people.”

— Gail Honeyman

269. “I bought some cat food for Glen on the way home. The thing about Glen is that, despite her offhand manner, she loves me. I know she’s only a cat. But it’s still love; animals, people. It’s unconditional, and it’s both the easiest and the hardest thing in the world.”

— Gail Honeyman

270. “Such small coincidences can pepper a life with interest.”

— Gail Honeyman

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “Twenty-first-century communication. I fear for our nation’s standards of literacy.”

— Gail Honeyman

275. “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

276. “I could tell he was being genuine because of all the warmth that was coming down the phone. Your voice changes when you’re smiling, it alters the sound somehow.”

— Gail Honeyman

277. “I did sometimes wonder what it would be like to have someone – a cousing, say, or a sibling – to call in times of need, or even just to spend unplanned time with. Some 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. Pointless to speculate, though. I had no one, and it was futile to wish it was otherwise. After all, it was no more than I deserved. And, really, I was fine, fine, fine.”

— Gail Honeyman

278. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

280. “It’s only pastry and mechanically recovered meat.”

— Gail Honeyman

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “By the time Keith was sitting on my sofa with a cup of tea, Glen had disappeared. She only really enjoyed her own company. She tolerated mine, but fundamentally she was a recluse at heart, like J. D. Salinger or the Unabomber.”

— Gail Honeyman

286. “He was wearing a denim jacket, paler than his denim trousers. I hadn’t considered that a suit could be fashioned from denim, but there it was.”

— Gail Honeyman

287. “Mummy always said that an obsession with home interiors was tediously bourgeois and, worse still, that any kind of “do-it-yourself” activities were very much the preserve of the hoi polloi. It’s quite frightening to think about the ideas that I may have absorbed from Mummy.”

— Gail Honeyman

288. “I walked through the fire and I lived.”

— Gail Honeyman

289. “We ended up in a bar five minutes from the hospital, on a busy road. One of the tables outside was unoccupied. The metal surface was covered in circular stains and its legs looked unstable, but Raymond seemed delighted. “Seats outside!” he said, happily throwing himself down and hanging his jacket over the back of his chair. “Right then, I’ll go to the bar,” he said. “What are you after, Eleanor?”

— Gail Honeyman

290. “I suppose one of the reasons we’re all able to continue to exist for our allotted span in this green and blue vale of tears is that there is always, however remote it might seem, the possibility of change.”

— Gail Honeyman

291. “I do feel that tube tops are best suited to the under twenty-fives, if, indeed, they are suited to anyone.”

— Gail Honeyman

292. “I’d spent more in these last few weeks than I usually spent in a year. Social interaction, it appeared, was surprisingly expensive – the travel, the clothes, the drinks, the lunches, the gifts.”

— Gail Honeyman

293. “I opened my mouth and heard the flesh and gums peel apart, like orange segments being separated.”

— Gail Honeyman

294. “He reached in and lifted out the fattest cat I’d ever seen.”

— Gail Honeyman

295. “We laughed far longer than his feeble witticism merited, just because it felt good.”

— Gail Honeyman

296. “I let myself be held, moved closer into the embrace in fact, because, I was forced to admit, at that particular time and in those particular circumstances, and feeling the way I did, the sensation of being held by him was nothing short of miraculous.”

— Gail Honeyman

297. “I’d made my legs black, and my hair blonde. I’d lengthened and darkened my eyelashes, dusted a flush of pink onto my cheeks and painted my lips a shade of dark red which was rarely found in nature. I should, by rights, look less like a human woman than I’d ever done, and yet it seemed that this was the most acceptable, the most appropriate appearance that I’d ever made before the world.”

— Gail Honeyman

298. “Go to Bobbi Brown, tell them Claire sent you.”

— Gail Honeyman

299. “There is categorically no need for eye contact when the person concerned is wielding sharp implements.”

— Gail Honeyman

300. “Why him? Why now? On Monday morning, waiting at the bus stop, I tried to work it out. It was a tricky one. 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