Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “He seemed very out of breath, placed both items gently on my hall carpet without being asked, and started to take off his jacket, still puffing and blowing like a beached porpoise. Smoking kills.”

— Gail Honeyman

302. “A philosophical question: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if a woman who’s wholly alone occasionally talks to a pot plant, is she certifiable?”

— Gail Honeyman

303. “There was, it seemed, no Eleanor-shaped social hole for me to slot.”

— Gail Honeyman

304. “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

305. “Their laughter seemed to have turned into low whispering now. It never ceases to amaze me, the things they find interesting, amusing or unusual. I can only assume they’ve led very sheltered lives.”

— Gail Honeyman

306. “Everybody needs to take a wee moment to themselves now and again, eh?”

— Gail Honeyman

307. “But no one has ever shown me the right way to live a life, and although I’d tried my best over the years, I simply didn’t know how to make things better. I could not solve the puzzle of me.”

— Gail Honeyman

308. “I’d found a way to help me move forward at last. A way to replace a loss with a gain.”

— Gail Honeyman

309. “After some contemplation, I had opted for a square of indeterminate white fish, which was coated in bread crumbs and deep fried and then inserted between an overly sweet bread bun, accompanied, bizarrely, by a processed cheese slice, a limp lettuce leaf and some salty, tangy white slime which bordered on obscenity.”

— Gail Honeyman

310. “She’s the only one I’ve got. And good girls love their mothers. After the fire, I was always so lonely. Any mummy was better than no mummy.”

— Gail Honeyman

311. “What, after all, is the point of eating out if you have to clear up yourself? You might as well have stayed at home.”

— Gail Honeyman

312. “I’m a widower, Eleanor,” Sammy said. “Jean died five years ago – cancer. Took her quick, in the end.” He paused and sat up straighter. “I’ve two sons and a daughter.”

— Gail Honeyman

313. “There isn’t anything to eat. Mummy will be back soon. Where’s Mummy?”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

315. “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

316. “I was homeschooled after that.”

— Gail Honeyman

317. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

320. “I do exist, don’t I? It often feels as if I’m not here, that I’m a figment of my own imagination. There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I’d lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock.”

— Gail Honeyman

321. “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

322. “He had his hands in the pockets of his low-slung denim trousers, and was wearing a strange, oversized woolen hat that I hadn’t seen before. It looked like the kind of hat that a German goblin might wear in an illustration from a nineteenth-century fairy tale, possibly one about a baker who was unkind to children and got his comeuppance via an elfin horde. I rather liked it.”

— Gail Honeyman

323. “I sat on my own and no one asked me to dance and I was absolutely fine with that.”

— Gail Honeyman

324. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

326. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

329. “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

330. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

332. “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

333. “The musician! How blessed.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

339. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

341. “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

342. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

346. “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

347. “He is a spectacularly unsophisticated conversationalist.”

— Gail Honeyman

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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