Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “After a minute or two, someone knocked tentatively on the living room door, and a face peeped round – Raymond.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

354. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “The jeans looked too small but, miraculously, they stretched around me and I was able to fasten them. The top was loose, with a high neck. I felt appropriately covered up, if nothing else, although I couldn’t see the cutout section at the back. I looked exactly like everyone else. I supposed that was the point.”

— Gail Honeyman

363. “Eleanor. However hard you try to walk away from that fact, you can’t, darling, you simply can’t. It isn’t possible to destroy a bond that strong.”

— Gail Honeyman

364. “Danny left, Eleanor,’ she said, not looking up from her screen. ‘There’s a new guy now. Raymond Gibbons? He started last month?’ She said this as though I should have known. Still not looking up, she wrote his full name and telephone extension on a Post-it note and handed it to me.”

— Gail Honeyman

365. “He loped off with a strange bouncy walk, springing too hard on the balls of his feet. A lot of unattractive men seem to walk in such a manner, I’ve noticed.”

— Gail Honeyman

366. “A daughter’s relationship with her father can sometimes influence her subsequent relationships with men. Do you have any thoughts about that, Eleanor?”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “I had done such things in the past, tried to be kind, tried to take care, I knew that I had, but that was before.”

— Gail Honeyman

376. “It was hardly surprising that my mother had become institutionalized – that, one assumed, was a given, considering the nature of her crime – but she had gone far, far further than necessary by occasionally adopting the accent and argot of the places where she has been detained.”

— Gail Honeyman

377. “He looked closely at me. “What happened to your face? You don’t” – he leaned forward quickly, touched my arm over the blanket – “you definitely don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I’m just being a nosy bastard!”

— Gail Honeyman

378. “It turned out that if you saw the same person with some degree of regularity, then the conversation was immediately pleasant and comfortable – you could pick up where you left off, as it were, rather than having to start afresh each time.”

— Gail Honeyman

379. “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

380. “If I’m ever unsure as to the correct course of action, I’ll think, “What would a ferret do?”

— Gail Honeyman

381. “I had convinced myself that he was the one, that he would help to make me normal, fix the things that were wrong with my life.”

— Gail Honeyman

382. “I had no idea what it was, but I realized that I’d happily sit here in the warmth with him and watch a golf programme if that was all there was.”

— Gail Honeyman

383. “He wasn’t using a knife, but held a fork in his right hand like a child or an American.”

— Gail Honeyman

384. “I needed to make something happen, anything. I couldn’t keep passing through life, over it, under it, around it. I couldn’t go on haunting the world like a wraith.”

— Gail Honeyman

385. “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

386. “Which way are you going, Eleanor?” he asked. I considered the best response to this question. I was heading home for an exciting rendezvous. This highly unusual occasion – an appointment with a visitor to my home – meant that I needed to curtail this tedious, unplanned interaction posthaste.”

— Gail Honeyman

387. “Dying of loneliness is not hyperbole. When I feel like that, my head drops and my shoulders slump and I ache, I physically ache, for human contact.”

— Gail Honeyman

388. “As always, Mummy was scary. But the thing was, this time – for the first time ever – she’d actually sounded scared too.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

390. “The cat squirmed in my arms and landed on the carpet with a heavy thump. She strolled over to the litter tray, squatted down and urinated loudly, maintaining extremely assertive eye contact with me throughout. After the deluge, she lazily kicked over the traces with her back legs, scattering litter all over my freshly cleaned floor. A woman who knew her own mind and scorned the conventions of polite society. We were going to get along just fine.”

— Gail Honeyman

391. “Eventually I decided to start from the outside and work my way in. That’s what happens in nature after all: shedding skin, rebirth. Animals birds and insects can provide such useful insights. If I’m ever unsure of the correct course of action, I’ll think what would a ferret do? Or how would a salamander respond to this situation? Invariably I find the right answer.”

— Gail Honeyman

392. “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.”

— Gail Honeyman

393. “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

394. “I noticed him glance at me, and then he slowed his steps to match mine. 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.”

— Gail Honeyman

395. “You grew inside me, your teeth and your tongue and your cervix are all made from my cells, my genes.”

— Gail Honeyman

396. “But, by careful observation from the sidelines, I’d worked out that social success is often built on pretending just a little. Popular people sometimes have to laugh at things they don’t find very funny, do things they don’t particularly want to, with people whose company they don’t particularly enjoy. Not me. I had decided, years ago, that if the choice was between that or flying solo, then I’d fly solo. It was safer that way.”

— Gail Honeyman

397. “What, I wondered, was the point of me? I contributed nothing to the world, absolutely nothing, and I took nothing from it either. When I ceased to exist, it would make no material difference to anyone. Most people’s absence from the world would be felt on a personal level by at least a handful of people. I, however, had no one. I do not light up a room when I walk into it. No one longs to see me or to hear my voice.”

— Gail Honeyman

398. “I have yet to find a genre of music I enjoy; it’s basically audible physics, waves and energized particles, and, like most sane people, I have no interest in physics. It therefore struck me as bizarre that I was humming a tune from Oliver! I mentally added the exclamation mark, which, for the first time ever, was appropriate.”

— Gail Honeyman

399. “My eye was drawn to a bright green hue, the same shade as a poisonous Amazonian frog, the tiny, delightfully deadly ones.”

— Gail Honeyman

400. “I have yet to find a genre of music I enjoy; it’s basically audible physics, waves and energized particles, and, like most sane people, I have no interest in physics.”

— Gail Honeyman