Top 150 Rachel Joyce Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

104. “Real love was not a bolt out of the blue, it was not the playing of violins, it was like anything else, it was a habit of the heart. You got up every day and you put it on, same as your pants, your boots, and you kept treading the constant path.”

— Rachel Joyce

105. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

108. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

111. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

127. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

129. “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

130. “Silence was where the magic happened.”

— Rachel Joyce

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

134. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

146. “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

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

150. “Moonlight filled the shop like water.”

— Rachel Joyce