Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Everything seems worse in the darkest hours of the night.”

— Gail Honeyman

352. “The Guinness, Raymond. It was three pounds fifty.” He stared at me. “It’s OK,” I said, “there’s no rush. You can give it to me on Monday, if that’s easier.”

— Gail Honeyman

353. “I’m nearly thirty years old now and I’ve been working here since I was twenty-one. Bob, the owner, took me on not long after the office opened. I suppose he felt sorry for me. I had a degree in Classics and no work experience to speak of, and I turned up for the interview with a black eye, a couple of missing teeth and a broken arm.”

— Gail Honeyman

354. “And the office is largely staffed by shirkers and idiots, Raymond”.”

— Gail Honeyman

355. “What about your mum, Eleanor? What happened to her?” I gulped the rest of my wine down as fast as I could. “I’d prefer not to discuss Mummy, if that’s all right, Raymond.”

— Gail Honeyman

356. “Nevertheless, I couldn’t attend Sammy’s funeral in inappropriate clothing. The black dress, the assistant assured me, was smart, but could also be “dressed down.” The coat could be worn all winter. My jerkin had more than paid for itself over the years, but I would keep it, of course, in case it was required again in future. I hung everything up carefully. I was ready. Bring out your dead.”

— Gail Honeyman

357. “I did not own any Tupperware, having no need of it until this point. I could go to a department store to purchase some. That seemed to be the sort of thing that a woman of my age and social circumstances might do. Exciting!”

— Gail Honeyman

358. “People seem to like me better with makeup on, for some reason,” I said. He raised his eyebrows and shrugged, apparently as stumped as I was.”

— Gail Honeyman

359. “He had the look of a gazelle or an impala, one of those boring beige animals with large, round eyes on the side of its face. The kind of animal that always gets eaten by a leopard in the end.”

— Gail Honeyman

360. “It’s not you, libraries, it’s me, as the popular saying goes. The thought of books passing through so many unwashed hands – people reading them in the bath, letting their dogs sit on them, picking their nose and wiping the results on the pages. People eating cheesy crisps and then reading a few chapters without washing their hands first. I just can’t. No, I look for books with one careful owner.”

— Gail Honeyman

361. “Then I felt bad. Even alcoholics deserve help, I suppose, although they should get drunk at home, like I do, so that they don’t cause anyone else any trouble. But then, not everyone is as sensible and considerate as me.”

— Gail Honeyman

362. “All of the people in the room seemed to take so much for granted: that they would be invited to social events, that they would have friends and family to talk to, that they would fall in love, be loved in return, perhaps create a family of their own. How would I celebrate my own fortieth birthday? I wondered. I hoped I would have people in my life to mark the occasion when the time came.”

— Gail Honeyman

363. “I work in accounts, Mrs. Gibbons,” I said. I told her a bit about my job, and she appeared to be fascinated, nodding along and occasionally saying “Is that right?” and “My my, isn’t that interesting.” When I ended my monologue, having exhausted the already limited conversational opportunities afforded by accounts receivable, she smiled.”

— Gail Honeyman

364. “The computer made that annoying ping which indicates the arrival of an electronic message. I clicked on it without thinking. How I despise these Pavlovian responses in myself!”

— Gail Honeyman

365. “Graphic design is of no interest to me. I’m a finance clerk. I could be issuing invoices for anything, really: armaments, Rohypnol, coconuts.”

— Gail Honeyman

366. “They gave it to me, unloved, unwanted, irreparably damaged. Also the table.”

— Gail Honeyman

367. “With my animal grooming regime in mind, I would turn my attention to my talons.”

— Gail Honeyman

368. “She certainly seemed to have a life, not just an existence. She seemed happy. It must be possible, then.”

— Gail Honeyman

369. “The goal, ultimately, was successful camouflage as a human woman.”

— Gail Honeyman

370. “Danny left, Eleanor,” she said, not looking up from her screen. “There’s a new guy now. Raymond Gibbons? He started last month?”

— Gail Honeyman

371. “I knew what was happening. It was the unscarred piece of my heart. It was just big enough to let in a bit of affection. There was still a tiny bit of room left. “Raymond,” I said, “you can’t know how much it means to me, to have a friend – a genuine, caring friend.”

— Gail Honeyman

372. “Part of me, a very small sliver, briefly considered dipping my head to taste a drop, purely because I’d been ordered not to.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

374. “It takes a long time to learn to live with loss, assuming you ever manage it. After all these years, I’m still something of a work in progress in that regard.”

— Gail Honeyman

375. “Yes,” I said, and then, remembering my manners, I muttered, “Thank you, Raymond.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

378. “I’m responsible. I chose to put myself in a situation where I’m responsible, wanting to look after her, a small, dependent, vulnerable creature. It’s innate and I don’t even have to think about it. It’s like breathing – for some people.”

— Gail Honeyman

379. “At the office, there was that palpable sense of Friday joy, everyone colluding with the lie that somehow the weekend would be amazing and that, next week, work would be different, better. They never learn.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

381. “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

382. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

389. “Only this morning I’d been furious, and now I was calm and happy. I was gradually getting used to feeling the range of available human emotions, their intensity, the rapidity with which they could change. Until now, anytime that emotions, feelings, had threatened to unsettle me, I’d drink them down fast, drown them. That had allowed me to exist, but I was starting to understand that I needed, wanted, something more than that now.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “Anyway, a nice nurse came and spoke to me, and explained that people who truly love you don’t hurt you, and that it wasn’t right to stay with someone who did. The way she explained it, it all made sense. I should have been able to work it out for myself, really.”

— Gail Honeyman

395. “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

396. “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

397. “Unprompted, Raymond started to tell me about his mother, how he was going to visit her tomorrow, something he did every Sunday. She was a widow and not terribly well. She had a lot of cats, and he helped her care for them. On and on and on he droned. I interrupted him.”

— Gail Honeyman

398. “Mummy told me, years ago, that men go absolutely crazy for sausage rolls.”

— Gail Honeyman

399. “You can’t protect other people, however hard you try.”

— Gail Honeyman

400. “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