Top 150 Rachel Joyce Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Sometimes I think depression must be like a dance in your head and anything can trigger it, if you know that dance.”

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

103. “She was nothing but the remembering.”

— Rachel Joyce

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “The way to Heaven is not through the clouds. It’s in the joy with which you look at the world despite your pain and your sorrow.”

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

121. “Moonlight filled the shop like water.”

— Rachel Joyce

122. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

128. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

130. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

133. “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

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. “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

136. “We write ourselves certain parts and then keep playing them as if we have no choice. But a tardy person can become a punctual one, if she chooses. You don’t have to keep being the thing you have become. It is never too late.”

— Rachel Joyce

137. “It was hard to have been her guest. It was hard to understand a little and then walk away.”

— Rachel Joyce

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

141. “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

142. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

144. “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

145. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

147. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

149. “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

150. “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