Top 150 Rachel Joyce Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

104. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

106. “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

107. “But no matter how awful life was, I would never want to give up. I would always want to keep living. Just waiting for that moment when it might get better. You need to remember that, Marge. You must never give up again.” She touched her belly. “We are not the things that happened to us. We can be what we like.”

— Rachel Joyce

108. “She had stayed because, however lonely she was with Harold, the world without him would be even more desolate.”

— Rachel Joyce

109. “We don’t know what to do with sadness. That’s the problem. We want to put it out of the way and we can’t.”

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

111. “So you see, people are rarely the straightforward things we think they are. Even the villains in a story can turn round and surprise us.”

— Rachel Joyce

112. “That was why Peg loved the Messiah best of all. Because it showed people they were not alone. No matter about their differences, the music lifted them up and lowered them down, only to raise them even higher. It worked like a spell.”

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

114. “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

115. “October passed. Leaves that his mother had once looked at loosened from the trees and twisted through the air, gathering in a slippery carpet at Byron’s feet.”

— Rachel Joyce

116. “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

117. “Die sichere Welt des Schlafs hatte keinen Platz fuer sie.”

— Rachel Joyce

118. “Frank wanted a song that would arrive like a little raft and carry this man safely home.”

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

120. “As time passed and he found his rhythm, he began to feel more certain. England opened up beneath his feet, and the feeling of freedom, of pushing into the unknown, was so exhilarating he had to smile.”

— Rachel Joyce

121. “In the absence of anything holy, and probably also in the absence of much that was kind, Enid had built her entire world around superstition. It would be as hard to knock it down as flatten a cathedral.”

— Rachel Joyce

122. “But there were moments of joy. Even at its worst, life will offer such moments.”

— Rachel Joyce

123. “Now that he had accepted the slowness of himself, he took pleasure in the distance he covered.”

— Rachel Joyce

124. “It is no good thinking about how life will get better once you have a new television or a new job. You must stop hoping for change. You must simply be it.”

— Rachel Joyce

125. “People think you have to walk to go on a journey, but you don’t, you see. You can lie in a bed and make a journey too.”

— Rachel Joyce

126. “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

127. “Besides, I was thrown by your eyes. The blue of them was so generous, I couldn’t quite think of anything else.”

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “It is hard to look back on a moment when you are haring right through the center of it.”

— Rachel Joyce

133. “Sometimes you have to do something with your pain because otherwise it will swallow you.”

— Rachel Joyce

134. “Moonlight filled the shop like water.”

— Rachel Joyce

135. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

137. “I’m terrified of mules. I got bitten once. Enid, I cannot go on a mule. It will bite me.” “Margery, if you do not get on a mule, I will bite you.”

— Rachel Joyce

138. “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

139. “Being a friend meant accepting those unknowable things. It meant saying, “Look! Look how big my leg is! And look how small yours is! Look how marvelously different we are, you and I, and yet here we are, together in this strange world!”

— Rachel Joyce

140. “The place was not cruel. It was worse. It didn’t notice.”

— Rachel Joyce

141. “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.”

— Rachel Joyce

142. “He no longer saw distance in terms of miles. He measured it with his remembering.”

— Rachel Joyce

143. “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

144. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

146. “The essential loneliness of people was there, wherever you cast your eye – it was in a service station, it was in a bookshop, it was in a parked car by the side of the road – so the things they did to try and bear the loss were choices that required respect. Such acts of love were only so many different ways of saying the same thing, because really there were no words to say.”

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

148. “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

149. “They were a delicious bunch but always forgetting the sensible things like food and daylight and remembering only the more intoxicating ones like love and gin.”

— Rachel Joyce

150. “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