Top 400 Gail Honeyman Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Such small coincidences can pepper a life with interest.”

— Gail Honeyman

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

410. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

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

— Gail Honeyman

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

418. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

423. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

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

— Gail Honeyman

430. “I let myself be held, moved closer into the embrace in fact, because, I was forced to admit, at that particular time and in those particular circumstances, and feeling the way I did, the sensation of being held by him was nothing short of miraculous.”

— Gail Honeyman

431. “I’d made my legs black, and my hair blonde. I’d lengthened and darkened my eyelashes, dusted a flush of pink onto my cheeks and painted my lips a shade of dark red which was rarely found in nature. I should, by rights, look less like a human woman than I’d ever done, and yet it seemed that this was the most acceptable, the most appropriate appearance that I’d ever made before the world.”

— Gail Honeyman

432. “Go to Bobbi Brown, tell them Claire sent you.”

— Gail Honeyman

433. “There is categorically no need for eye contact when the person concerned is wielding sharp implements.”

— Gail Honeyman

434. “Why him? Why now? On Monday morning, waiting at the bus stop, I tried to work it out. It was a tricky one. 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

435. “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

436. “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