Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “I understood that assisted conception was the antithesis of careless, spontaneous or unplanned parenthood, that it was the most deliberate of decisions, undertaken only by women who were serious and dedicated in their quest to be mothers.”

— Gail Honeyman

403. “Things didn’t feel right; I hadn’t been able to relax yesterday, hadn’t been able to settle to anything. I just felt on edge, somehow. If my mood was a crossword clue, the answer would be “discombobulated.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “I felt like a trapped animal – a steer or a rabid dog and imagined the chaos I’d caused if, careering wildly, I was corralled in there against my will.”

— Gail Honeyman

410. “He held up a packet of organic curly kale. “What the hell is this?” he said, incredulous. Zinc, I whispered to myself. Raymond hustled me out of the.”

— Gail Honeyman

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “Did you have a good time on Saturday, then?” he asked. I wished it had been between mouthfuls, but it was, in fact, horrifically, during one. “Yes, thank you,” I said. “It was the first time I’ve tried dancing, and I quite enjoyed it.” He kept forking the food into his mouth. The process, and the noise, seemed almost industrial in its relentlessness.”

— Gail Honeyman

422. “My hair was mousy brown, parted in the center, straight and not particularly thick. Human hair, doing what human hair does: growing on my head.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

424. “During the next free-form jigging section, I started to wonder why the band was singing about, presumably, the Young Men’s Christian Association, but then, from my very limited exposure to popular music, people did seem to sing about umbrellas and fire-starting and Emily Bronte novels, so, I supposed, why not a gender- and faith-based youth organization?”

— Gail Honeyman

425. “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. A boyfriend – a husband? – might just do the trick. It wasn’t that I needed anyone. I was, as I previously stated, perfectly fine.”

— Gail Honeyman

426. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

433. “You had a lucky escape with Mum and the photo albums this time, Eleanor,” Raymond said. “She’ll bore the pants off you next time about the grandkids, just you wait and see.” He was making a lot of assumptions there, I thought, but I let it pass.”

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

435. “The words were incredibly sad, and, for an atheist like myself, entirely without hope or comfort, but still; it was our duty to sing them to the best of our ability, and to sing proudly, in honor of Sammy.”

— Gail Honeyman

436. “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