Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “That evening, I had planned to relax with a cup of Bovril and listen to a very interesting radio program about South American politics, after completing my usual checks on what Johnnie Lomond was up to. He’d sent a desultory tweet about a character in a television program and posted a photograph on Facebook of a new pair of boots he wanted. A slow news day, then. Hearing from Mummy on a Monday was an unexpected, unwelcome surprise.”

— Gail Honeyman

302. “Men like Raymond, pedestrial dullards, would always be distracted by women who looked like her, having neither the wit nor the sophistication to see beyond mammaries and peroxide.”

— Gail Honeyman

303. “I should have been offended that he was commandeering my living space, but instead I felt relief, overwhelming relief at being taken care of.”

— Gail Honeyman

304. “Silence sat between us, shivering with misery.”

— Gail Honeyman

305. “I wondered if thats what it would be like in a family – it was simply that you would know, almost unthinkingly, that they’d be there if you needed them, no matter how bad things got. Im not prone to envy, as a rule, but I must confess I felt a twinge when I thought about this. Envy was a minor emotion in comparison to the sorrow I felt at never having a chance to experience this... what was it? Unconditional love, I supposed.”

— Gail Honeyman

306. “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

307. “Whatever Raymond was eating smelled disgusting, like gently reheated vomit.”

— Gail Honeyman

308. “The world just went on, regardless of what happened. That’s how it works.”

— Gail Honeyman

309. “Annoyingly, we began walking down the path at the same time.”

— Gail Honeyman

310. “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

311. “Have you ever had counseling before, Miss Oliphant?” she said, taking out a notebook from her handbag. It had, I noticed, several accessories attached to it, key rings and the like – a pink, fluffy monkey, a giant metallic letter M, and, most hideous of all, a tiny, sequinned red stiletto shoe. I’d come across the type before. Ms. Temple was “fun.”

— Gail Honeyman

312. “El mundo estaba lleno de posibilidades infinitas.”

— Gail Honeyman

313. “I went to see Loretta, the office manager. She has overinflated ideas of her own administrative abilities, and in her spare time makes hideous jewelry, which she then sells to idiots.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

315. “Daringly, I didn’t put my name, because I realized he’d know it was from me.”

— Gail Honeyman

316. “There he was, a gift from the gods – handsome, elegant and talented. I was fine, perfectly fine on my own, but I needed to keep Mummy happy, keep her calm so she would leave me in peace.”

— Gail Honeyman

317. “I did briefly consider taking up smoking,” I admitted, “but I thoroughly research all activities before commencement, and smoking did not in the end seem to me to be a viable or sensible pastime. It’s financially rebarbative too,” I said.”

— Gail Honeyman

318. “I realized that such small gestures – the way his mother had made me a cup of tea after our meal without asking, remembering that I didn’t take sugar, the way Laura had placed two little biscuits on the saucer when she brought me coffee in the salon – such things could mean so much. I wondered how it would feel to perform such simple deeds for other people.”

— Gail Honeyman

319. “There: soft fingers on vibrating steel, and a chord shimmered into the air, nebulous and milky, like light from an old, old star. A voice: warm and low and gentle, a voice to cast spells, charm snakes, shape the course of dreams.”

— Gail Honeyman

320. “You can’t have too much dog in a book.”

— Gail Honeyman

321. “I allowed my mind to wander. I’ve found this to be a very effective way of passing the time; you take a situation or a person and start to imagine nice things that might happen. You can make anything happen, anything at all, inside a daydream.”

— Gail Honeyman

322. “His eyes were light brown. They were light brown in the way that a rose is red, or that the sky is blue. They defined what it meant to be light brown.”

— Gail Honeyman

323. “In my eagerness to change, to connect with someone, I’d focused on the wrong thing, the wrong person.”

— Gail Honeyman

324. “After much reflection on the political and sociological aspects of the table, I have realized that I am completely uninterested in food. 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

325. “I took a breath. Back in that house, on a good day. Stripes of sunshine on the carpet, a board game set out on the floor, a pair of dice, two brightly colored counters. A day with more ladders than snakes.”

— Gail Honeyman

326. “I don’t think anyone on earth would understand what it feels like to me. That’s just a fact. I don’t think anyone else has lived through precisely the set of circumstances I’ve lived through. And survived them, at any rate.”

— Gail Honeyman

327. “I saw him bend down to light the cigarette of a woman in a wheelchair – she’d brought her drip out with her, on wheels, so that she could destroy her health at the same time as taxpayers’ money was being used to try and restore.”

— Gail Honeyman

328. “They were all right, I guess,” he said, shrugging. Such insight, such clear, descriptive prose. Bernadette piped up, as I knew she would, unable to resist an opportunity to draw attention to herself by any means available.”

— Gail Honeyman

329. “My childhood was full of culinary contradiction, and I’ve dined on both hand-dived scallops and boil-in-the-bag cod over the years. After much reflection on the political and sociological aspects of the table, I have realized that I am completely uninterested in food. My preference is for fodder that is cheap, quick and simple to procure and prepare, whilst providing the.”

— Gail Honeyman

330. “They were heels which were easy to walk in, but which were, nonetheless “very feminine.” On what basis was this decided, and by whom? Did it matter? I made a mental note to research gender politics and gender identity at some point. There would be a book about it – there were books about everything.”

— Gail Honeyman

331. “Listen, the past isn’t over. The past is a living thing. Those lovely scars of yours – they’re from the past, aren’t they? And yet they still live on your plain little face. Do they still hurt?” I shook my head, but said nothing. “Oh, they do – I know they do. Remember how you got them, Eleanor. Was it worth it? For her? Oh, there’s room on your other cheek for a bit more hurt, isn’t there? Turn the other cheek for Mummy, Eleanor, there’s a good girl.”

— Gail Honeyman

332. “Lesson: I must be prepared at all times.”

— Gail Honeyman

333. “She was always telling us we had to be on the lookout for someone who was good enough.” I shook my head. “I suppose that’s how I ended up here,” I said. “Trying to find someone like that, and then getting confused and making a giant mess of everything.”

— Gail Honeyman

334. “But, by careful observation from the sidelines, I’d worked out that social success is often built on pretending just a little.”

— Gail Honeyman

335. “I could almost believe that someone might enjoy, or at least tolerate, my company over the duration of a brief luncheon, but it stretched credibility to think that it could happen twice in one week.”

— Gail Honeyman

336. “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

337. “The past is a living thing.”

— Gail Honeyman

338. “How different Raymond’s life had been from mine – a proper family, a mother and a father and a sister, nestled among other proper families. How different it was still; every Sunday, here, this.”

— Gail Honeyman

339. “Ignis aurum probat. “Fire tests gold.”

— Gail Honeyman

340. “A woman who knew her own mind and scorned the conventions of polite society. We were going to get along just fine.”

— Gail Honeyman

341. “Everything was there, obvious to us both, but it all remained unsaid.”

— Gail Honeyman

342. “She certainly seems to have a life, not just an existence.”

— Gail Honeyman

343. “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

344. “Eyelids are really just flesh curtains.”

— Gail Honeyman

345. “I couldn’t imagine how it would be possible to hike to the source of the Nile, or to climb up a ladder to investigate a malfunction inside a particle accelerator, wearing kitten heels and ten denier tights.”

— Gail Honeyman

346. “Sleep came like a sledgehammer.”

— Gail Honeyman

347. “His bare ankles looked distressingly white above his oxblood leather brogues, which he had teamed with green jogging bottoms. A madman.”

— Gail Honeyman

348. “I cleared my throat before I spoke, realizing that I hadn’t uttered a word for almost twelve hours, back when I told the taxi driver where to drop me off. That’s actually quite good, for me – usually, I don’t speak from the point at which I state my destination to the bus driver on Friday night, right through until I greet his colleague on Monday morning.”

— Gail Honeyman

349. “You shouldn’t give yourself a hard time for not having a ten-year career plan.”

— Gail Honeyman

350. “He actually sounded like he meant both; that he would indeed see me soon, and that he wished me to take care of myself.”

— Gail Honeyman