Top 150 Rachel Joyce Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Sometimes I think depression must be like a dance in your head and anything can trigger it, if you know that dance.”

— Rachel Joyce

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

61. “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

62. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

65. “She was nothing but the remembering.”

— 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. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

75. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

77. “When you know a thing is wrong, you have to work very hard to stick with it.”

— Rachel Joyce

78. “Harold was so tired he could barely lift his feet, and yet he felt such hope, he was giddy with it. If he kept looking at the things that were bigger than himself, he knew he would make it to Berwick.”

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

80. “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

81. “I think that loving another person and being kind is about the best thing you can do.”

— Rachel Joyce

82. “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

83. “Enid had been right. She had been right all along. Margery’s adventure was not about making her mark on the world: it was about letting the world make its mark on her.”

— Rachel Joyce

84. “Finding the beetle is your life’s work and mine is having a baby. It’s our vocation, Marge. If we don’t do it, we’ll die of sadness. Giving up isn’t an option.”

— Rachel Joyce

85. “The gods. We think we understand, we’ve invented science, but we haven’t a clue. Maybe the clever people are not the ones who think they’re clever. Maybe the clever people are the ones who accept they know nothing.”

— Rachel Joyce

86. “I would never want to give up. I would always want to keep living. Just waiting for that moment when it might get better.”

— Rachel Joyce

87. “Don’t try to see ahead to the nice bits. Don’t try to see ahead to the end. Stay with the present, even if it is not so good. And consider how far you’ve already come.”

— Rachel Joyce

88. “Besides she had been raised in a house of women whose skill at not saying a difficult thing verged on professional. The truth had become such an elusive entity, she could as easily talk about her feelings as ride a mule.”

— Rachel Joyce

89. “The delicate needle on the scale moved more and more slowly – she seemed to be putting on weight, even as she stood there. Maybe it also weighed the heaviness in your heart.”

— Rachel Joyce

90. “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

91. “Silently he had moved within her until deep inside she opened like a flower.”

— Rachel Joyce

92. “Sometimes, Harold, the way forward takes you by surprise. You try to force something in the familiar direction and discover that what it needs is to move in a different dimension. The way forward is not forward, but off to one side, in a place you have not noticed before.”

— Rachel Joyce

93. “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

94. “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

95. “Answered prayers can be frightening, suggesting – as they do – an obligation to act.”

— Rachel Joyce

96. “Margery’s heart dropped. Or maybe it was her stomach. Hard to tell. Since drinking Enid’s coffee, her insides had begun to swap places.”

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

98. “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

99. “No one knows how to be normal, Jim. We’re all just trying our best. Sometimes we don’t have to think about it and other times it’s like running after a bus that’s already halfway down the street.”

— Rachel Joyce

100. “Silence was where the magic happened.”

— Rachel Joyce