Top 50 Graham Joyce Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Twenty years is, after all, a long time. We are not the same people we were. Old friends, lovers, even family members: they are strangers who happen to wear a familiar face. We have no right to claim to know anyone after such a distance.”

— Graham Joyce

2. “Go deep within yourself and be fearless in search of the treasure you are but have momentarily forgotten.”

— Graham Joyce

3. “Because two people in love don’t make a hive mind. Neither should they want to be a hive mind, to think the same, to know the same. It’s about being separate and still loving each other, being distinct from each other. One is the violin string one is the bow.”

— Graham Joyce

4. “Some people feed you with love.”

— Graham Joyce

5. “The modern superstition is that we’re free of superstition.”

— Graham Joyce

6. “Recasting fairy tales has become a publishing sub-genre in itself, and has been done both well and to the point of entropy. More interesting are those works where the structures of fairytales are abandoned but the world of ‘fairy’ is imported as a delicate spice.”

— Graham Joyce

7. “The thing is, when everyone is trying to persuade you that a thing you know to be true isn’t actually true, you start to believe them: not because it is true but because it’s easier. It’s just the easy way out.”

— Graham Joyce

8. “The blood in my veins is frozen but it sings of love.”

— Graham Joyce

9. “Of course, everything depends on who is telling the story. It always does.”

— Graham Joyce

10. “You can be an aging rock star, but you can’t be an aging wannabe rock star.”

— Graham Joyce

11. “The overintellectualization of surrealism can be a bromide. A dream interpreted is a deflated dream.”

— Graham Joyce

12. “The mist hung in the air like a prancing unicorn.”

— Graham Joyce

13. “But it’s like life, isn’t it? We know death is coming. And yet we always see our loved ones as taken away from us, instead of given to us for whatever time they have.”

— Graham Joyce

14. “Rome is a place almost worn out by being looked at, a city collapsing under the weight of reference.”

— Graham Joyce

15. “Some people feed you with love,” Tara said, “and some people love you with food.”

— Graham Joyce

16. “Every day the eye is subject to a thousand tiny shocks as a thousand industries compete for the eye-kick, the visual hook that will lock the consumer into product for that crucial second where the tiny – or not so tiny – leap of the imagination is made.”

— Graham Joyce

17. “Why can’t our job here on earth be simply to inspire each other?”

— Graham Joyce

18. “She couldn’t see him, but his voice was like light through a stained-glass window in a cathedral.”

— Graham Joyce

19. “If critics of ‘readable fiction’ want literature to change the ways people dream, they need first to come down from the mountain and speak to the people.”

— Graham Joyce

20. “I’d defend the right for any novelist to experiment with form or language, but if people don’t take to it, don’t react by making out that they are thick.”

— Graham Joyce

21. “What I mean is this: you meet someone, you think about them. You’re already changing because of the way you think about them. You meet them again, you think about them some more, you’re changing again. And on it goes. You are changing right now. Before my eyes.”

— Graham Joyce

22. “I have to get out once a week and speak with people or I start thinking I’m the emperor of Abyssinia.”

— Graham Joyce

23. “The fey wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them. CHARLES DE LINT.”

— Graham Joyce

24. “It is, of course, the first recourse of every elitist to see social barbarism in others.”

— Graham Joyce

25. “The trouble with forgiveness is that some people don’t want to be forgiven.”

— Graham Joyce

26. “Rationally speaking, blaming one’s behavior on alcohol or drugs is like blaming the ladder by which you descended into a pit, or the staircase that took you down to a cellar, for what you found there.”

— Graham Joyce

27. “Sometimes in this life you have to understand that we don’t need to know everything.”

— Graham Joyce

28. “That’s emails for ya: sometimes they’re like an arrow that hits so deep in the target, you can’t pull it out.”

— Graham Joyce

29. “I’ve been playing ‘Doom’ for some years.”

— Graham Joyce

30. “Repression in the human psyche is tightly bundled. When it has been pulled out of the sprung package so often it is perhaps difficult to push it back in the box.”

— Graham Joyce

31. “I am less interested in ghosts than in people who see ghosts.”

— Graham Joyce

32. “I’ve been a professional writer for 20 years, and there are contours in that time, crescents and troughs.”

— Graham Joyce

33. “Fairy tales are about money, marriage and men. They are maps and manuals that are passed down from mothers and grandmothers to help them to survive. MARINA WARNER.”

— Graham Joyce

34. “If I couldn’t get published tomorrow I’d still be writing. It’s something to do with feeling so overwhelmed by this experience of life that you have to tell someone about it, and in a way that reorders the experience to make it manageable.”

— Graham Joyce

35. “Because while the world is filled with people who just need to let their demon go, there is another group who need to find themselves one.”

— Graham Joyce

36. “Perhaps writers should never be allowed to get together in a workplace context. It’s not like studying computer science, after all. The emotions are at large, and are shared and are questioned. There is a vulnerability.”

— Graham Joyce

37. “It was then that I thought: Judith I could slap your face for a whole day and not stop even for lunch.”

— Graham Joyce

38. “Though most love songs are protest songs, when you think about it.”

— Graham Joyce

39. “Fantasy gets a mixed reception – a lot of fantasy is formulaic but most of the award-winning fantasy on the contrary tends to be the stuff at the edges of the genre, rather than swimming in the middle.”

— Graham Joyce

40. “George Orwells 1984 frequently tops surveys of our greatest books: its not a celebration of poetic language. Its decidedly anti-literary, a masterpiece of personal and political narrative sequence. And its subject matter is crucial, because what 1984 shows is that language can be a dirty trick.”

— Graham Joyce

41. “The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism’s anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.”

— Graham Joyce

42. “I told her that I’d done things in my youth that had placed me beyond the comfort and shelter of love, and so i had conducted my life in retreat.”

— Graham Joyce

43. “Not hungry, thanks, Mum.” “Have just a sandwich.” “No, thanks.” “I can make you a nice ham sandwich. Ham and mustard.” “No, really.” “Cheese? There’s some nice cheddar.” “Honestly, no.” “It’s no trouble.” “Oh, for goodness’ sake! Okay! I give in! I’ll have a bloody sandwich!” “You don’t have to have one,” Mary said, “if you don’t want one.”

— Graham Joyce

44. “No one needs a first edition. Whoever wrote it; even if it was Moses.”

— Graham Joyce

45. “The awesome silence of the place crept up on her. The spruce and pines, all still laden with snow, spread their limbs in a frozen ballet, breathing a ghostly incense from dark, arid chapels sheltered by their branches.”

— Graham Joyce

46. “You let go. It’s as simple and as complicated as Antonia had told me. You cry. You come. You sing. You laugh. You scream. You let go. No one needs to hang on to a first edition. Whoever wrote it; even if it was Moses. I looked back up at the sky, blinking at the lustrous beauty of the ascending and departing demons. They formed an alphabet I was beginning to learn to read. They were fire in the sky.”

— Graham Joyce

47. “Perhaps living souls had greater phantom powers than the dead.”

— Graham Joyce

48. “It’s just that to a lot of British people George Bush represents the worst of all things American. He’s the right-wing Christian crusader, the toxic Texan who refused Kyoto, the poll-cheat eel who undermined democracy on the back of something called ‘chads,’ a notion we’ve never entirely grasped.”

— Graham Joyce

49. “But there are times in life when a door opens and you are offered a glimpse of the light on the water, and you know that if you don’t take it, that door slams shut, and maybe forever. Maybe you fool yourself into thinking that you had a choice at all; maybe you were always going to say yes. Maybe refusing was no more a choice than is holding your breath. You were always going to breathe. You were always going to say yes.”

— Graham Joyce

50. “Good, because if you have got a problem with it I can’t see you. Can’t smoke, can’t see. You can’t smoke anywhere these days. That’s why I gave up and organized my practice from home. You can drive a bloody car pell-mell with a high risk of slaughtering a thousand little children a year but you can’t smoke in case they get a whiff of your tobacco. What sort of a country is that?” He.”

— Graham Joyce