Top 150 Rachel Joyce Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Rachel Joyce

52. “She had travelled to the other side of the world, but the distance she’d covered inside herself was immeasurable.”

— Rachel Joyce

53. “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

54. “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

55. “She couldn’t find it. That fleeting moment of goodness. People imagined they might reach each other, but it wasn’t true. No one understood another’s grief or another’s joy. People were not see-through at all.”

— Rachel Joyce

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “Dear Lord. Please help us to understand what we don’t know. It is our differences that make us richer. All will be well.”

— Rachel Joyce

61. “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

62. “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

63. “Real love was not a bolt out of the blue, it was not the playing of violins, it was like anything else, it was a habit of the heart. You got up every day and you put it on, same as your pants, your boots, and you kept treading the constant path.”

— Rachel Joyce

64. “Doch als er annahm, lernte er damit auch etwas Neues. Empfangen war nicht weniger ein Geschenk als geben, denn es verlangte sowohl Mut als auch Demut.”

— Rachel Joyce

65. “If we work at it, it’s always possible that we can find a fashionable explanation for what we don’t understand. But perhaps it is wiser once in a while to accept that we don’t understand and stop there. To explain is sometimes to diminish. And what does it matter if I believe one thing and you believe another. We shared the same end.”

— Rachel Joyce

66. “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

67. “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

68. “We hang on by so little, he thought, and felt the full despair of knowing that.”

— Rachel Joyce

69. “As writers, we must do everything we can to make a world that stands up as if it could be a real one. Not necessarily the real one; not necessarily the world the reader knows. But within its own confines, that world must be plausible. It must add up. After that, the reader meets you halfway. The reader fills out your words with pictures, with breath, with feeling. CR:.”

— Rachel Joyce

70. “In the end, it makes no difference who you are. It’s friends that count.”

— Rachel Joyce

71. “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

72. “THIS MORNING I asked Sister Lucy if I could borrow a dictionary and a thesaurus. She fetched Pictionary and a throat lozenge.”

— Rachel Joyce

73. “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

74. “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

75. “It wasn’t that he was losing his mind, rather that he was deliberately taking things out of it that he no longer needed.”

— Rachel Joyce

76. “He put everything back in his haversack, but he didn’t know what to do with the things from the past. He had no idea where you were supposed to put things that existed only inside your head.”

— Rachel Joyce

77. “I let you go, Harold, because you were not mine and you never would be. You belonged to your wife.”

— Rachel Joyce

78. “Despite his obligation to other people, he wished at that moment he had walls.”

— Rachel Joyce

79. “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

80. “I am starting again, I thought. Because that is what you do when you reach the last stop. You make a new beginning.”

— Rachel Joyce

81. “But war was not over just because someone signed a truce. It was inside him. And when a thing like war was inside you, it never left.”

— Rachel Joyce

82. “You have to think bigger than what you know,” James.”

— Rachel Joyce

83. “Forgive me, forgive me, for continuing to live when you are gone.”

— Rachel Joyce

84. “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

85. “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

86. “It was hard to understand a little and then walk away.”

— Rachel Joyce

87. “We all should accept what the earth gives freely. It is an act of grace.”

— Rachel Joyce

88. “The superhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday.”

— Rachel Joyce

89. “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

90. “A father cannot see his son with the eyes of a stranger, and so he misses things. It is one of life’s small tragedies.”

— Rachel Joyce

91. “They just had to look after one another. They would be OK, so long as they stuck together.”

— Rachel Joyce

92. “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

93. “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

94. “We had once what we can never have again. So why, then, do we behave as if everything we have connected with, everything we have blessed with our loving, should be ours for keeps? It is enough to have tiptoed to that space beyond the skin, beyond our nerve endings, and to have glimpsed things that beforehand we only half knew.”

— Rachel Joyce

95. “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

96. “And I felt a little burst of pleasure, because when you said those things I believed you, in the same way I felt safe when you put on your driving gloves and turned the key in the ignition.”

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

98. “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

99. “There was a patient who sat with her family in a circle around her, all holding hands. Sister Philomena asked if they would like to join her for prayers and they said yes, they would. They closed their eyes as Sister Philomena whispered the words and I thought this must be the nearest humans get to whatever God is, when they hold hands and listen.”

— Rachel Joyce

100. “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