Rachel Joyce Quotes

#1. I had to get away from him. Sometimes we reject the people who tell the truth and it is not because they are wrong. It is because we can't

Rachel Joyce

#2. He walked for surely it was as if all his life he had been waiting to get up from his chair.

Rachel Joyce

#3. Endings, it seems, are not all they're cracked up to be.

Rachel Joyce

#4. Silently he had moved within her until deep inside she opened like a flower.

Rachel Joyce

#5. Again he felt in a profound way that he was both inside and outside what he saw; that he was bith connected, and passing through. Harold began to understand that this was also the truth about his walk. He was both a part of things, and not.

Rachel Joyce

#6. We were very happy' - it was such a pleasure to voice these things, she wished there were more words. 'Very happy

Rachel Joyce

#7. Sometimes her words sliced down on his before they had even reached his mouth.

Rachel Joyce

#8. My mother's view on love appalled me. It suggested love had more in common with the boiling of an egg than the discovery of another person from whom one couldn't bear to live apart

Rachel Joyce

#9. He had always been too English; by which he supposed he meant that he was ordinary.

Rachel Joyce

#10. For me, writing is such an escape, and I felt very lucky to have this to run away to.

Rachel Joyce

#11. In walking, he unleashed the past that he had spent twenty years seeking to avoid, and now it chattered and played through his head with a wild energy that was its own.

Rachel Joyce

#12. We write ourselves certain parts and then keep playing them as if we have no choice. But a tardy person can become a punctual one, if she chooses. You don't have to keep being the thing you have become. It is never too late.

Rachel Joyce

#13. On television, it's all just shiny, successful people, and so I feel somebody has to wave a flag for the ordinary people who are not quite sure that they are getting it right.

Rachel Joyce

#14. That's what nobody realizes. Two seconds are huge. It's the difference between something happening and something not happening. You could take one step too many and fall over the edge of a cliff. It's very dangerous.

Rachel Joyce

#15. The world is full of women who have children, and women who don't, but there is also a silent band of women who almost had them. I am one of those. I was a mother. And then I wasn't.

Rachel Joyce

#16. He doesn't know if the words they are using actually mean the things they purport to mean or whether the words have taken on a new significance. They are talking about nothing, after all. And yet these words, these nothings, are all they have, and he wishes there were whole dictionaries of them.

Rachel Joyce

#17. He had never been good at expressing himself. What he felt was so big it was difficult to find the words, and even if he could, it was hardly appropriate to write them to someone he had not contacted in twenty years.

Rachel Joyce

#18. I went through a stage of writing my cramped hand in tiny books. My two sisters and I did have our Bronte period. My mum is from Yorkshire, and we would go up to the Moors. It tapped into our romantic visions of ourselves.

Rachel Joyce

#19. He saw that people would make the decisions they wished to make, and some of them would hurt both themselves and those who loved them, and some would pass unnoticed, while others would bring joy. He

Rachel Joyce

#20. You have to think bigger than what you know, James

Rachel Joyce

#21. She had touched life, played with it a little, but it is a slippery bugger, and finally we must close the door, and leave it behind. A

Rachel Joyce

#22. It is a hard thing, as I said, this learning to love. But it is an even harder thing, I think, to learn to be ordinary.

Rachel Joyce

#23. Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.

Rachel Joyce

#24. When I first met you, I was ready. I had a space for you.

Rachel Joyce

#25. Branches of spiraea bowed under sleeves of blossom, and delphinium shoots nudged the soil. With the

Rachel Joyce

#26. Sometimes you have to do something with your pain because otherwise it will swallow you.

Rachel Joyce

#27. He visited the cathedral, and sat in its chilled light, pouring like water from above. He reminded himself that centuries ago men had built churches, bridges, and ships, all of them a leap of madness and faith, if you thought about it.

Rachel Joyce

#28. He hunched his shoulders and drove his feet harder, as if he wasn't so much walking to Queenie as away from himself.

Rachel Joyce

#29. He knew he had trusted Wilf against the odds, but somehow he had also trusted that there was a basic goodness to be found in everyone, and that this time he could tap into it.

Rachel Joyce

#30. They had offered him comfort and shelter, even when he was afraid of taking them, and in accepting he had learned something new. It was as much of a gift to receive as it was to give, requiring as it did both courage and humility.

Rachel Joyce

#31. Not believing that her wanting him alive wasn't enough to bring him back.

Rachel Joyce

#32. The place was not cruel. It was worse. It didn't notice.

Rachel Joyce

#33. I have written stories since I was a child.

Rachel Joyce

#34. And it can take a lifetime, a life of many years, to accept the incongruity of things: that a small moment can sit side by side with a big one, and become part of the same.

Rachel Joyce

#35. There is so much to the human mind we don't understand. But, you see, if you have faith, you can do anything.

Rachel Joyce

#36. Actors go inside the heads of other people and are not afraid of the complicated places you can find yourself.

Rachel Joyce

#37. To explain is sometimes to diminish. And what does it matter if I believe one thing and you believe another? We share the same end.

Rachel Joyce

#38. Despite his obligation to other people, he wished at that moment he had walls.

Rachel Joyce

#39. I found out what was right only by getting it wrong.

Rachel Joyce

#40. This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in different people's minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader's experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up.

Rachel Joyce

#41. Before I gave birth to Hope, I had a miscarriage. The pain was so enormous, I had to write myself out of it. I kept a diary and did not feel entirely complete until Hope was born.

Rachel Joyce

#42. Mind where you're going, people muttered at me. I hated them, but really the person I hated was myself. I fled.

Rachel Joyce

#43. The people he met, the places he passed, were all steps in his journey, and he kept a place inside his heart for each of them.

Rachel Joyce

#44. I'd made my sea garden to atone for the terrible wrong I had done to a man I loved, I said. Sometimes you have to do something with your pain because otherwise it will swallow

Rachel Joyce

#45. No one knows how to be normal ... We're all just trying our best.

Rachel Joyce

#46. Why do you need someone else to tell you what you are? Why can't you just write for the sake of writing? You don't have to be famous to do those things.

Rachel Joyce

#47. The nudity of his words took him by surprised, as if it were Harold himself who was wearing no clothes.

Rachel Joyce

#48. Maybe the clever people are not the ones who think they're clever. Maybe the clever people are the ones who accept that they know nothing.

Rachel Joyce

#49. He thought of that half-forgotten world lived in houses and streets and cars, where people ate three times a day, slept by night, and kept each other company. He was glad they were safe, and he was glad too that he was at last outside them.

Rachel Joyce

#50. I think lots of ideas are sometimes in our heads without us quite, you know, knowing it.

Rachel Joyce

#51. There was something febrile about her independence that made him nervous on her behalf.

Rachel Joyce

#52. If I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, it stands to reason that I'm going to get there. I've begun to think we sit far more than we're supposed to." He smiled. "Why else would we have feet?

Rachel Joyce

#53. I find that very appealing: the blurring of the lines between what's funny and what's tragic. And what's ordinary and what's not - the big things in the small things.

Rachel Joyce

#54. A flock of seagulls rise and swoop above the black profile of the moor, and they are so luminous, so fragile, it would be easy to mistake them for shreds of paper.

Rachel Joyce

#55. I think of myself as a very ordinary person. I like writing about the juxtaposition between people: the beauty of them at times and then the banal, everyday context in which we find ourselves.

Rachel Joyce

#56. October passed. Leaves that his mother had once looked at loosened from the trees and twisted through the air, gathering in a slippery carpet at Byron's feet.

Rachel Joyce

#57. We hang on by so little, he thought, and felt the full despair of knowing that.

Rachel Joyce

#58. I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It's like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it's there and keep falling in. After a while, it's still there, but you learn to walk round it.

Rachel Joyce

#59. It's [grief] like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it's there, and you keep falling in. After a while, it's still there, but you learn to walk around it.

Rachel Joyce

#60. How oft," he murmured, "when men are at the point of death have they been merry!

Rachel Joyce

#61. A flock of gulls flew east, rising and falling, as if they might clean the sky with their wings.

Rachel Joyce

#62. Even if we don't believe in church or God, we still believe in things that are bigger than ourselves. We need to believe in those things because if we can't be open to what we don't know, there's no hope for any of us.

Rachel Joyce

#63. I knew then that you would always see the positive side because you liked people, and you wanted the best for them. It was intoxicating.

Rachel Joyce

#64. They believed in him. They had looked at him in his yachting shoes, and listened to what he said, and they had made a decision in their hearts and minds to ignore the evidence and to imagine something bigger and something infinitely more beautiful than the obvious.

Rachel Joyce

#65. Giving my love to you was like finding a convenient vessel into which to pour the thing I had no use for, just as you had found a bin in the yard for your unwanted empties.

Rachel Joyce

#66. You got up, and you did something. And if trying to find a way when you don't even know you can get there isn't a small miracle; then I don't know what is.

Rachel Joyce

#67. After several hours, he realized he had been so lost in remembering and mourning the past, he had wasted two miles heading in the wrong direction.

Rachel Joyce

#68. Sometimes you cannot clear the past completely. You must live alongside your sorrow.

Rachel Joyce

#69. (She cupped his face in her palms.) They were so close now that his features lost distinction and all she could see was the feeling she had for him.

Rachel Joyce

#70. You don't get to a place by constantly moving, even if your journey is only one of sitting still and waiting. Every once in a while you have to stop your tracks and admire the view, a small cloud an a tree outside your window

Rachel Joyce

#71. After the two drinks, she felt warm inside, and slightly indistinct at the edges.

Rachel Joyce

#72. He no longer saw distance in terms of miles. He measured it with his remembering

Rachel Joyce

#73. Sometimes you can love something not because you instinctively connect with it but because another person does, and keeping their things in your heart takes you back to them.

Rachel Joyce

#74. I just want someone to see me, Q. See who I really am. It is what we all want, in the end; to be seen.

Rachel Joyce

#75. The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other; and a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had been doing so for a long time.

Rachel Joyce

#76. (He) feels (his) words reach him. They slide beneath his orange uniform and touch his bones.

Rachel Joyce

#77. Sometimes a person can smile when you are feeling only the difficulty of a thing and the problem unravels before your eyes and becomes straightforward.

Rachel Joyce

#78. I actually hate Christmas," says Eileen. "Everybody has this idea you have to have a good time, like happiness comes in a ruddy packet." Her face is flushed with heat. "One time, I stayed in bed all day. That was one of my best Christmases.

Rachel Joyce

#79. You could be ordinary and attempt something extraordinary, without being able to explain it in a logical way.

Rachel Joyce

#80. Jim looks out the car window with his nose pressed to the glass. Sometimes he pretends to be asleep. Not because he is tired, but because he needs to be quiet.

Rachel Joyce

#81. Sometimes, Harold, the way forward takes you by surprise. You try to force something in the familiar direction and discover that what it needs is to move in a different dimension. The way forward is not forward, but off to one side, in a place you have not noticed before.

Rachel Joyce

#82. The gods. We think we understand, we've invented science, but we haven't a clue. Maybe the clever people are not the ones who think they're clever. Maybe the clever people are the ones who accept they know nothing.

Rachel Joyce

#83. Hashtag Harold Fry. Hashtag Queenie Hennessy. Hashtag unlikely pilgrimage. Hashtag hospice. Hashtag respect. Hashtag live forever. I don't know. Your names seem to be all over the place.

Rachel Joyce

#84. Paula says that the problem is that people like Jim are too good. And he knows that the problem is not them. The problem is that people need other people (like Eileen) to be too bad.

Rachel Joyce

#85. We are quick to stick labels on others - especially those who don't fit in with the norm. 'Harold Fry' is about a broken marriage; 'Perfect' is about a broken person. They are both about finding kindness where you least expect it.

Rachel Joyce

#86. There was anger for a while, and then there was something else, that was like silence but had an energy and violence of its own.

Rachel Joyce

#87. I went to see Dad in hospital after he had gone through one particularly grueling operation. I walked into the room where he was recovering, and he was sitting up in a chair, wearing his shirt and tie. That was after eight hours of surgery. I found that so moving.

Rachel Joyce

#88. It had been unbearable to hear those things, and even though she had wept in his arms afterwards, and apologized, they were in the air when he was alone, and there was no unsaying them.

Rachel Joyce

#89. Sister Lucy is one of the kindest young women I've met. When it comes to French manicures and blow-drying, she has no equal. But I don't believe the poor girl has ever seen a map of England.
No wonder she is challenged by her jigsaw.

Rachel Joyce

#90. Thank fuck that's over," said Finty, rubbing at her mouth and her sweatshirt. "Let's have a game of Scrabble.

Rachel Joyce

#91. Sometimes it is easier, he thinks, to live out the mistakes we have made than to summon the energy and imagination required to repair them.

Rachel Joyce

#92. He had wanted more than he could physically give, and so his walk had become a battle against himself, and he had failed.

Rachel Joyce

#93. I loved you and you didn't know. I loved you and that was enough.

Rachel Joyce

#94. She looked at him and her heart tipped sideways.

Rachel Joyce

#95. So long as I could see you every weekday, I was happy to love you from the sidelines.

Rachel Joyce

#96. My dad was always busy. You would pop round for a cup of tea, and within minutes you would see him walking past with a step-ladder. He was always fixing things.

Rachel Joyce

#97. His shirt, tie, and trousers were folded small as an apology on a faded blue-velvet chair.

Rachel Joyce

#98. I never saw you without a golf club tie.
I never saw you with a golf club.
I never saw you without yachting shoes.
I never saw you in a yacht.

Rachel Joyce

#99. When the doctors told us she was dying I held her hand and gave up. We both did. I know it wouldn't have made any difference in the end but I wish I had let her see how much I wanted to keep her. I should have raged, Maureen.

Rachel Joyce

#100. If we can't accept what we don't know, there really is no hope.

Rachel Joyce