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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

72. “She was nothing but the remembering.”

— Rachel Joyce

73. “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

74. “Over time, Peg played all the silences she loved. The more Frank listened, the more he understood. Silence could be exciting, it could be scary, it could be like flying, or even a really good joke. Years later, he would hear that final pause in “A Day in the Life” by the Beatles – the one that gave just enough time to breathe before the last chord fell like a piece of furniture from the sky – and he would dance with joy at the sheer audacity of it.”

— Rachel Joyce

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

85. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

87. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

89. “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

90. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

92. “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

93. “Silence was where the magic happened.”

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

100. “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