Top 150 Rachel Joyce Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “Frank was so busy loving other people he had no room to accommodate the fact that someone might turn around one day and love him back.”

— Rachel Joyce

62. “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

63. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

65. “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

66. “Sometimes I think depression must be like a dance in your head and anything can trigger it, if you know that dance.”

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

78. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

80. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

82. “The letter that would change everything arrived on a Tuesday.”

— Rachel Joyce

83. “She was nothing but the remembering.”

— Rachel Joyce

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “Aretha is soul. You can’t argue with Aretha.”

— Rachel Joyce

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

94. “It was hard to have been her guest. It was hard to understand a little and then walk away.”

— Rachel Joyce

95. “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

96. “For Frank, music was like a garden – it sowed seeds in far-flung places. People would miss out on so many wonderful things if they only stuck with what they knew.”

— Rachel Joyce

97. “When I first met you, I was ready. I had a space for you.”

— Rachel Joyce

98. “No one knows how to be normal... We’re all just trying our best.”

— Rachel Joyce

99. “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

100. “Time was what held the world together. It kept life as it should be.”

— Rachel Joyce