Rachel Joyce Quotes

“I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It's like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it's there and keep falling in. After a while, it's still there, but you learn to walk round it.”

— Rachel Joyce

“Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.”

— Rachel Joyce

You got up, and you did something. And if trying to find a way when you don't even know you can get there isn't a small miracle; then I don't know what is.

— Rachel Joyce

“Beginnings could happen more than once, or in different ways.”

— Rachel Joyce

“He must have driven this way countless times, and yet he had no memory of the scenery. He must have been so caught up in the day's agenda, and arriving punctually at their destination, that the land beyond the car had been no more than a wash of one green, and a backdrop of one hill. Life was very different when you walked through it.”

— Rachel Joyce

“If I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, it stands to reason that I'm going to get there. I've begun to think we sit far more than we're supposed to." He smiled. "Why else would we have feet?”

— Rachel Joyce

“If we can't accept what we don't know, there really is no hope.”

— Rachel Joyce

“You could be ordinary and attempt something extraordinary, without being able to explain it in a logical way.”

— Rachel Joyce

“People would make the decisions they wished to make and some of them would hurt both themselves and those who loved them, and some would pass unnoticed, while others would bring joy.”

— Rachel Joyce

“The least planned part of the journey, however, was the journey itself.”

— Rachel Joyce

“I think of myself as a very ordinary person. I like writing about the juxtaposition between people: the beauty of them at times and then the banal, everyday context in which we find ourselves.”

— Rachel Joyce

“My father died in France, and my sisters and I went over with my mum to bring back his body. I remember going to the funeral parlour in France and being given a laminated menu of coffins, and thinking, surely there is an ice cream at the back of here!”

— Rachel Joyce

“We are quick to stick labels on others - especially those who don't fit in with the norm. 'Harold Fry' is about a broken marriage; 'Perfect' is about a broken person. They are both about finding kindness where you least expect it.”

— Rachel Joyce

“I am not expecting anyone to feel sorry for me, but when friends ask how it feels to be a debut novelist who has also been long listed for the Man Booker prize, I have to admit that my response has confused me. I am so overwhelmed, so delighted, so honoured and so surprised, I have come out in a violent cold.”

— Rachel Joyce

“I went through a stage of writing my cramped hand in tiny books. My two sisters and I did have our Bronte period. My mum is from Yorkshire, and we would go up to the Moors. It tapped into our romantic visions of ourselves.”

— Rachel Joyce

“I have written stories since I was a child.”

— Rachel Joyce

“The characters in my stories all have quite loud lives in my head. It's a relief to get them on the page. Often they come from people I've noticed or overheard - but that is only a part of them. It's only by writing that I discover who these people really are.”

— Rachel Joyce

Actors go inside the heads of other people and are not afraid of the complicated places you can find yourself.

— Rachel Joyce

“He was a chap like himself, with a unique pain; and yet there would be no knowing that if you passed him in the street, or sat opposite him in a cafe”

— Rachel Joyce

“Things don't so much end as disappear. They don't so much begin as turn up. You think there will be a time to say goodbye, but people have often gone before you know about it. And I don't just mean the dying.”

— Rachel Joyce

“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

“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

“It struck Harold afresh how life could change in an instant. You could be doing something so everyday - walking your partner's dog, putting on your shoes - and not knowing that everything you wanted you were about to lose.”

— Rachel Joyce

“I can't explain why I think I can get there, when all the odds are against me. But I do. Even when a big part of me is saying I should give up, I can't. Even when I don't want to keep going, I still do it”

— Rachel Joyce

“Perhaps I took my mother more literally than she intended, but I applied her rule to my life; after all, we are all searching for them, the rules. We pick them up from the strangest places, and if they appear to work once we can live a whole lifetime by them, regardless of the unhappiness and difficulty they may later bring.”

— Rachel Joyce

“It surprised him that he was remembering all this. Maybe it was the walking. Maybe you saw even more than the land when you got out of the car and used your feet.”

— Rachel Joyce

“In walking, he unleashed the past that he had spent twenty years seeking to avoid, and now it chattered and played through his head with a wild energy that was its own.”

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

“When the doctors told us she was dying I held her hand and gave up. We both did. I know it wouldn't have made any difference in the end but I wish I had let her see how much I wanted to keep her. I should have raged, Maureen.”

— Rachel Joyce

“Again he felt in a profound way that he was both inside and outside what he saw; that he was bith connected, and passing through. Harold began to understand that this was also the truth about his walk. He was both a part of things, and not.”

— Rachel Joyce

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

— Rachel Joyce

“When a thing is taken away, you see more clearly what it brought to your life ...”

— Rachel Joyce

“Thank fuck that's over," said Finty, rubbing at her mouth and her sweatshirt. "Let's have a game of Scrabble.”

— Rachel Joyce

“Es kam Harold seltsam, aber unvermeidlich vor, dass Touristen an religioesen Staetten Souvenirschnickschnack kaufen, sie wissen eben sonst nicht, was sie dort tun sollen.”

— Rachel Joyce

“And what no one else knew was the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The inhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday. The loneliness of that. Moved and”

— Rachel Joyce

“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

“Queenie Hennessy - "I am here to die."
Sister Mary Inconnue - "Pardon me but you are here to live until you die. There is a significant difference.”

— Rachel Joyce

“After that she paired each of her outfits with one of his. She tucked the cuff of her blouse in his blue suit pocket. A skirt hem she looped around a trouser leg. Another dress she wrapped in the embrace of his blue cardigan. It was as if lots of invisible Maureens and Harolds were loitering in her wardrobe, simply waiting fro the opportunity to step out. It made her smile, and then it made her cry; but she didn't change them back.”

— Rachel Joyce

“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

My dance shoes. I reached the water's edge and I felt the terrible despair of someone who is used to running because that is what she had always done, and now she faces a brick wall

— Rachel Joyce

“We were very happy' - it was such a pleasure to voice these things, she wished there were more words. 'Very happy”

— Rachel Joyce

“It's a shame short men don't wear heels; it would save the world a lot of trouble.”

— Rachel Joyce

“How could he say all this? It amounted to a lifetime. He could try to find the words, but they would never hold the same meaning for her that they did for him. "My house," he would say; and the image that would spring to her head would be of her own. There was no saying it.”

— Rachel Joyce

“After several hours, he realized he had been so lost in remembering and mourning the past, he had wasted two miles heading in the wrong direction.”

— Rachel Joyce

They caught hands again, and walked toward the water's edge, two small figures against the black waves. Only halfway there, one of them must have remembered again and it passed like a fresh current of joy between them. They stood at the water's edge, not letting go, and rocked with laughter.

— Rachel Joyce

“She had touched life, played with it a little, but it is a slippery bugger, and finally we must close the door, and leave it behind. A”

— Rachel Joyce

“You'd think walking should be the simplest thing," she said at last. "Just a question of putting one foot in front of the other. But it never ceases to amaze me how difficult the things that are supposed to be instinctive really are." She wet her lower lip with”

— Rachel Joyce

“For a moment I believed everything would turn out all right for me because you clearly desired that too.”

— Rachel Joyce

“It's [grief] like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it's there, and you keep falling in. After a while, it's still there, but you learn to walk around it.”

— Rachel Joyce

“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