Top 150 Rachel Joyce Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 4

101. “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

102. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

104. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

107. “Not a day has gone by when I have not thought of you. There was a time when I wished it would stop, when I tried to forget, but forgetting took such strength it was easier to accept you were a missing part of me and get on with life.”

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

118. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

125. “Endings, it seems, are not all they’re cracked up to be.”

— Rachel Joyce

126. “Moonlight filled the shop like water.”

— Rachel Joyce

127. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

129. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

132. “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

133. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

135. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

137. “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

138. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

144. “Giving my love to you was like finding a convenient vessel into which to pour the thing I had no use for, just as you had found a bin in the yard for your unwanted empties.”

— Rachel Joyce

145. “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

146. “Life is very different when you walked through it... How was it he never noticed all this before?”

— Rachel Joyce

147. “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

148. “I’d made my sea garden to atone for the terrible wrong I had done to a man I loved, I said. Sometimes you have to do something with your pain because otherwise it will swallow.”

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

150. “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