Top 150 Rachel Joyce Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “When you know a thing is wrong, you have to work very hard to stick with it.”

— Rachel Joyce

102. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

118. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

120. “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

121. “Silence was where the magic happened.”

— Rachel Joyce

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

125. “He had been guilty once or twice of believing he understood, only to discover he did not... There were times, he saw, when not knowing was the biggest truth, and you had to stay with that.”

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

137. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

141. “Moonlight filled the shop like water.”

— Rachel Joyce

142. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

144. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

147. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

149. “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

150. “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