Top 150 Rachel Joyce Quotes (2024 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. “If we don’t go mad once in a while, there’s no hope.”

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

5. “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

6. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

9. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

15. “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

16. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

22. “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

23. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

25. “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

26. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “If only memory were a library with everything stored where it should be. If only you could walk to the desk and say to the assistant, I’d like to return the painful memories about David Fry or indeed his mother and take out some happier ones, please. About stickleback fishing with my father. Or picnicking on the banks of the Cherwell when I was a student.”

— Rachel Joyce

37. “PEOPLE CAN love in different ways,’ I told David. ‘You can love full on, with a lot of noise, or you can do it quietly, over the washing-up. You.”

— Rachel Joyce

38. “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

39. “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

40. “You could say things in the car and know she had tucked them somewhere safe among her thoughts, and that she would not judge him for them, or hold it against him in years to come. He supposed that was what friendship was, and regretted all the years he had spent without it.”

— Rachel Joyce

41. “He knew he was going to reach Berwick, and that all he had to do was to place one foot in front of the other. The simplicity of it was joyful. If he kept going forward, he would of course arrive.”

— Rachel Joyce

42. “You ease a record from its cover. It’s years since you’ve held one but you do this without thinking. Slide your fingers inside the sleeve, careful not to touch the vinyl. Draw it out. Hear the rustle of paper. Balance it in the span of your palm, the outer rim on your thumb, the label on the tip of your middle finger. As it brushes your wrist, feel the soft static kiss of it. Smooth as liquorice and twice as shiny. Light spills over it like water. Breathe in the new smell.”

— Rachel Joyce

43. “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

44. “I am someone who has always run from difficulty, and it dawns on me that I don’t have to go on that way. 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

45. “Maybe it was the walking. Maybe you saw even more than the land when you got out of the car and used your feet.”

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

47. “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

48. “So is this what life is? The steady amassing of little things, trinkets, small prettinesses, that we save for and plan for, and which make the passing of time more meaningful, and yet which – come the end – will be wrapped in newspaper and driven to the charity shop? She.”

— Rachel Joyce

49. “Every morning there were silver snail trails crisscrossing the hall. There were cobwebs like soft clouds and pepperings of mold at the windowsills. The moor was coming inside.”

— Rachel Joyce

50. “Real love was a journey with many pitfalls and complications, and sometimes the place you ended up was not the one you hoped for.”

— Rachel Joyce