Top 150 Rachel Joyce Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Beginnings could happen more than once, or in different ways.”

— Rachel Joyce

3. “But maybe it’s what the world needs. A little less sense, and a little more faith.”

— Rachel Joyce

4. “If we don’t go mad once in a while, there’s no hope.”

— Rachel Joyce

5. “It was not a life, if lived without love.”

— Rachel Joyce

6. “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

7. “Beginnings could happen more than once or in different ways. You could think you were starting something afresh, when actually what you were doing was carrying on as before. He had faced his shortcomings and overcome them and so the real business of walking was happening only now.”

— Rachel Joyce

8. “If I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, it stands to reason that I’m going to get there.”

— Rachel Joyce

9. “I found out what was right only by getting it wrong.”

— Rachel Joyce

10. “When a thing is taken away, you see more clearly what it brought to your life...”

— Rachel Joyce

11. “Just because you’ve never done something doesn’t mean you can’t start.”

— Rachel Joyce

12. “There is no guarantee that just because you are ready to go back and claim something, it will be there.”

— Rachel Joyce

13. “Besides, the big things in life do not present themselves as such. They come in the quiet, ordinary moments – a phone call, a letter – they come when we are not looking, without clues, without warning, and that is why they floor us. 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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “If we can’t accept what we don’t know, there really is no hope.”

— Rachel Joyce

17. “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

18. “The past was the past; there was no escaping your beginnings.”

— Rachel Joyce

19. “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

20. “He understood that in walking to atone for the mistakes he had made, it was also his journey to accept the strangeness of others.”

— Rachel Joyce

21. “After the two drinks, she felt warm inside, and slightly indistinct at the edges.”

— Rachel Joyce

22. “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

23. “The least planned part of the journey, however, was the journey itself.”

— Rachel Joyce

24. “But it never ceases to amaze me how difficult the things that are supposed to be instinctive really are.”

— Rachel Joyce

25. “The sky and the sun are always there. It’s the clouds that come and go.”

— Rachel Joyce

26. “The sky and the sun are always there. It’s the clouds that come and go. Stop holding on to yourself, and look at the world around you.”

— Rachel Joyce

27. “Being with her was the same as staring into the sun; he saw nothing, and yet when he looked away, there she was, a raucous white light imprinted at the heart of everything.”

— Rachel Joyce

28. “Perhaps I took my mother more literally than she intended, but I applied her rule to my life; after all, we are all searching for them, the rules. We pick them up from the strangest places, and if they appear to work once we can live a whole lifetime by them, regardless of the unhappiness and difficulty they may later bring.”

— Rachel Joyce

29. “Waiting is about being still. You can’t keep busy every minute, otherwise you’re not waiting. You’re just throwing things around to distract yourself... 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 in your tracks... You have to see what you did not see before.”

— Rachel Joyce

30. “History is not made up by events alone, but also by what lies between the lines.”

— Rachel Joyce

31. “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 in your tracks and admire the view, a small cloud and a tree outside your window. You have to see what you did not see before. And then you have to sleep.”

— Rachel Joyce

32. “So long as I could see you every weekday, I was happy to love you from the sidelines.”

— Rachel Joyce

33. “You might travel to the other side of the world, but in the end it made no difference: whatever devastating unhappiness was inside you would come too.”

— Rachel Joyce

34. “Nobody is so frightening once you stop and listen, Maureen.”

— Rachel Joyce

35. “He would return to the old life he had almost forgotten, where people staked trinkets between themselves and the outside world.”

— Rachel Joyce

36. “Not a day has gone by when I have not thought of you. There was a time when I wished it would stop, when I tried to forget, but forgetting took such strength it was easier to accept you were a missing part of me and get on with life.”

— Rachel Joyce

37. “Endings, it seems, are not all they’re cracked up to be.”

— Rachel Joyce

38. “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

39. “You’d think walking should be the simplest thing,” she said at last. “Just a question of putting one foot in front of the other. But it never ceases to amaze me how difficult the things that are supposed to be instinctive really are.” She wet her lower lip with her tongue, waiting for more words. “Eating,” she said at last. “That’s another one. Some people have real difficulties with that. Talking too. Even loving. They can all be difficult.”

— Rachel Joyce

40. “Einen Anfang kann es oefter als einmal geben, und immer wieder anders. Man konnte sich auch nur einbilden, neu anzufangen, obwohl man denselben alten Stiefel weitermachte.”

— Rachel Joyce

41. “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

42. “I accepted that sometimes you cannot clear the past completely. You must live alongside your sorrow.”

— Rachel Joyce

43. “You think there will be a time to say goodbye, but people have often gone before you know about it.”

— Rachel Joyce

44. “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

45. “Things don’t so much end as disappear. They don’t so much begin as turn up. You think there will be a time to say goodbye, but people have often gone before you know about it. And I don’t just mean the dying.”

— Rachel Joyce

46. “Stories are important. We need them. It is through telling and hearing stories that we make sense of the world. Like dreams, they come to us when we are quiet and they tell us something or remind us of something that we need to hear. They say to us, ‘No, you’re not alone. Because that thing you feel, I feel it too.’ And sometimes they ask us to think again.”

— Rachel Joyce

47. “She returned to the deck to watch the sun set until only a segment was left above the horizon, followed by the smallest clipping, and then, just as it disappeared altogether, the sky gave an explosion of green, like a blazing emerald. It came and went. If she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, she wouldn’t have believed it.”

— Rachel Joyce

48. “It has been everywhere, my happiness – when my mother sang for me to dance, when my father took my hand to keep me safe – but it was such a small, plain thing that I mistook it for something ordinary and failed to see. We expect our happiness to come with a sign and bells, but it doesn’t.”

— Rachel Joyce

49. “I loved you and you didn’t know. I loved you and that was enough.”

— Rachel Joyce

50. “I say so many things that I don’t mean. It’s as if, even if I think something nice about Harold, by the time it’s got to my mouth it’s become not nice. He goes to tell me something and I’m saying ‘I think not’ before he’s finished the sentence.” “I always got cross with Elizabeth for leaving the top off the toothpaste. Now I take it off as soon as I open a new tube. I find I don’t want the lid.”

— Rachel Joyce