Graham Joyce Quotes & Sayings

But it's like life, isn't it? We know death is coming. And yet we always see our loved ones as taken away from us, instead of given to us for whatever time they have. — Graham Joyce

I mean," I said, "it's not like the lake is a living thing." This was perhaps the worst thing I could have said. He looked suddenly alarmed. He put a hand, sticky as it was with gray sand, over my mouth. "Hush, darlin' girl! Hush! The lake hears your every word and knows your every thought. — Graham Joyce

He looked like a once-green leaf that had begun to dry and to reveal the structure of its veins. — Graham Joyce

The overintellectualization of surrealism can be a bromide. A dream interpreted is a deflated dream. — Graham Joyce

Some people feed you with love. — Graham Joyce

No one needs a first edition. Whoever wrote it; even if it was Moses. — Graham Joyce

Because two people in love don't make a hive mind. Neither should they want to be a hive mind, to think the same, to know the same. It's about being separate and still loving each other, being distinct from each other. One is the violin string one is the bow. — Graham Joyce

The trouble with forgiveness is that some people don't want to be forgiven. — Graham Joyce

Demons do tend to cluster around the yellowing pages and cracked spines of second hand books. — Graham Joyce

Perhaps writers should never be allowed to get together in a workplace context. It's not like studying computer science, after all. The emotions are at large, and are shared and are questioned. There is a vulnerability. — Graham Joyce

'Plutocracy.' It has a perfect nuance: chilly, inaccessible, icy-rich. — Graham Joyce

George Orwell's '1984' frequently tops surveys of our greatest books: it's not a celebration of poetic language. It's decidedly anti-literary, a masterpiece of personal and political narrative sequence. And its subject matter is crucial, because what '1984' shows is that language can be a dirty trick. — Graham Joyce

You don't understand. Speaking, talking
language, that is
represents the most orderly, civilized, and rational expression of human nature. All this foul-mouthed cussing is a gap where you can't think of anything to say. It's the opposite of being rational and ordered. The very opposite. It wants to unpick civilized behavior, rationality, and order. — Graham Joyce

Rome is a place almost worn out by being looked at, a city collapsing under the weight of reference. — Graham Joyce

He said he preferred to feel the earth sing through his feet, and that shoes stopped you from hearing the song of the earth. — Graham Joyce

I've been a professional writer for 20 years, and there are contours in that time, crescents and troughs. — Graham Joyce

The awesome silence of the place crept up on her. The spruce and pines, all still laden with snow, spread their limbs in a frozen ballet, breathing a ghostly incense from dark, arid chapels sheltered by their branches. — Graham Joyce

You let go. It's as simple and as complicated as Antonia had told me. You cry. You come. You sing. You laugh. You scream. You let go. No one needs to hang on to a first edition. Whoever wrote it; even if it was Moses. I looked back up at the sky, blinking at the lustrous beauty of the ascending and departing demons. They formed an alphabet I was beginning to learn to read. They were fire in the sky. — Graham Joyce

I told her that I'd done things in my youth that had placed me beyond the comfort and shelter of love, and so i had conducted my life in retreat. — Graham Joyce

Every day the eye is subject to a thousand tiny shocks as a thousand industries compete for the eye-kick, the visual hook that will lock the consumer into product for that crucial second where the tiny - or not so tiny - leap of the imagination is made. — Graham Joyce

Perhaps living souls had greater phantom powers than the dead. — Graham Joyce

Twenty years is, after all, a long time. We are not the same people we were. Old friends, lovers, even family members: they are strangers who happen to wear a familiar face. We have no right to claim to know anyone after such a distance. — Graham Joyce

The bluebells made such a pool that the earth had become like water, and all the trees and bushes seemed to have grown out of the water. And the sky above seemed to have fallen down on to the earth floor; and I didn't know if the sky was the earth or the earth was water. I had been turned upside down. I had to hold the rock with my fingernails to stop me falling into the sky of the earth or the water of the sky. But I couldn't hold on. — Graham Joyce

His father had been slightly ahead, carrying sister Zoe. There were creatures looking at him from behind the blue slate rocks; they pointed their fingers and smiled cruel smiles. He felt safe in his mother's papoose (facing backwords) but was still afraid of the creatures. He was only just old enough to talk. He'd tried to make a sound but he was almost mesmerized by the creatures stirring in the wake of the family's passage. — Graham Joyce

I have to get out once a week and speak with people or I start thinking I'm the emperor of Abyssinia. — Graham Joyce

Not hungry, thanks, Mum." "Have just a sandwich." "No, thanks." "I can make you a nice ham sandwich. Ham and mustard." "No, really." "Cheese? There's some nice cheddar." "Honestly, no." "It's no trouble." "Oh, for goodness' sake! Okay! I give in! I'll have a bloody sandwich!" "You don't have to have one," Mary said, "if you don't want one. — Graham Joyce

What I mean is this: you meet someone, you think about them. You're already changing because of the way you think about them. You meet them again, you think about them some more, you're changing again. And on it goes. You are changing right now. Before my eyes. — Graham Joyce

The fey wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them. CHARLES DE LINT — Graham Joyce

Through the window a broken fingernail of moon was visible. — Graham Joyce

Someone said that thirty was a significant birthday, and everyone around the table agreed. Someone else said it was the first time you heard the bell.
What bell? someone asked.
But they all knew what bell. It was like you'd already completed a few laps, observed another, but this was the first time you'd properly heard the bell. There had been one at seven, but you hadn't heard it because you were so young; and then one at fourteen but you hadn't heard it because you were too busy looking over your shoulder; then another at twenty-one but you hadn't heard it because you were too busy talking; and then one at twenty-eight which for some reason took two years before you heard it. But they all agreed you did hear that one, eventually.
Your lousy career, said one guest. Babies, said one of the women. Lovers, friends, travel, said another. Parents aging. Bong. All the things you hadn't done. Might not do. Bong. — Graham Joyce

The blood in my veins is frozen but it sings of love. — Graham Joyce

I can tell you a dozen different stories. This is what we are: a collection of stories that we share, in common. This is what we are to each other. — Graham Joyce

She couldn't see him, but his voice was like light through a stained-glass window in a cathedral. — Graham Joyce

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot. — Graham Joyce

Fantasy gets a mixed reception - a lot of fantasy is formulaic but most of the award-winning fantasy on the contrary tends to be the stuff at the edges of the genre, rather than swimming in the middle. — Graham Joyce

Repression in the human psyche is tightly bundled. When it has been pulled out of the sprung package so often it is perhaps difficult to push it back in the box. — Graham Joyce

Jake, we haven't tried for awhile."
"Tried what?"
"Just to walk out."
"No."
"Why haven't we?"
"Because we're in a place where a horse shits rainbows."
"Right. — Graham Joyce

That's emails for ya: sometimes they're like an arrow that hits so deep in the target, you can't pull it out. — Graham Joyce

It's just that to a lot of British people George Bush represents the worst of all things American. He's the right-wing Christian crusader, the toxic Texan who refused Kyoto, the poll-cheat eel who undermined democracy on the back of something called 'chads,' a notion we've never entirely grasped. — Graham Joyce

Since I've been hired to contribute to the storyline of 'Doom 4' I can say what was always true anyway. I'm working. You see, for a writer, lots of stuff that doesn't look like working is actually working. Looking out of the window, for example. Balancing a pencil on the edge of the desk in order to find its exact fulcrum. Playing 'Doom.' — Graham Joyce

If I couldn't get published tomorrow I'd still be writing. It's something to do with feeling so overwhelmed by this experience of life that you have to tell someone about it, and in a way that reorders the experience to make it manageable. — Graham Joyce

Rationally speaking, blaming one's behavior on alcohol or drugs is like blaming the ladder by which you descended into a pit, or the staircase that took you down to a cellar, for what you found there. — Graham Joyce

If critics of 'readable fiction' want literature to change the ways people dream, they need first to come down from the mountain and speak to the people. — Graham Joyce

The mist hung in the air like a prancing unicorn. — Graham Joyce

Why can't our job here on earth be simply to inspire each other? — Graham Joyce

I LOVE HORSES!' shrieked the Tooth Fairy over his shoulder. — Graham Joyce

It was then that I thought: Judith I could slap your face for a whole day and not stop even for lunch. — Graham Joyce

The modern superstition is that we're free of superstition. — Graham Joyce

Recasting fairy tales has become a publishing sub-genre in itself, and has been done both well and to the point of entropy. More interesting are those works where the structures of fairytales are abandoned but the world of 'fairy' is imported as a delicate spice. — Graham Joyce

It is, of course, the first recourse of every elitist to see social barbarism in others. — Graham Joyce

Our literary culture is marinated in deep traditions of the fantastic and the supernatural, and we export those rich qualities in films and books on a spectacular industrial scale. — Graham Joyce

Peter was a gentle, red-haired bear of a man. Standing at six-four in his socks, he moved everywhere with a slight and nautical sway, but even though he was broad across the chest there was something centered and reassuring about him, like an old ship's mast cut from a single timber. — Graham Joyce

But there are times in life when a door opens and you are offered a glimpse of the light on the water, and you know that if you don't take it, that door slams shut, and maybe forever. Maybe you fool yourself into thinking that you had a choice at all; maybe you were always going to say yes. Maybe refusing was no more a choice than is holding your breath. You were always going to breathe. You were always going to say yes. — Graham Joyce

There are certain songs, and books, and films that are like points of high ground in the memory. Like they are even larger than your own experiences. They never go away. — Graham Joyce

There is no "mid" about it. Life is a crisis from the cradle to the grave. — Graham Joyce

And there was Tara, again with that shy half-smile and her burgundy lips slightly puckered, that shy kink, an incomplete curlicue at the corner of her mouth; he'd seen it before many times but never noted it, and now it had him mesmerized. — Graham Joyce

The thing is, when everyone is trying to persuade you that a thing you know to be true isn't actually true, you start to believe them: not because it is true but because it's easier. It's just the easy way out. — Graham Joyce

My story reflexes come less from fantasy or horror than from the darker sort of psychological thriller - not as plot-driven as most, rather more mood-driven. My interest in the supernatural is a complication - though I am less interested in ghosts than in people who see ghosts. — Graham Joyce

Clive, at moments like this, had a smile like the lace in an old-style football. Anyone could be forgiven for wanting to boot it. — Graham Joyce

Some people feed you with love," Tara said, "and some people love you with food. — Graham Joyce

I've been playing 'Doom' for some years. — Graham Joyce

I'd defend the right for any novelist to experiment with form or language, but if people don't take to it, don't react by making out that they are thick. — Graham Joyce

They were an end-of-days couple, not naked in a garden but wrapped in layers in a snow-covered landscape where there were no more apples on the trees and women would no longer have to take the blame because the old lie had been covered over by snow. — Graham Joyce

The music
the making of music and the performing of music
produced memories, many good, some bad, some difficult. But he knew for sure that he'd spent too much of that time living not in the present moment of creating or playing music but in the expectation or hope of some reward, some success. He had always been waiting for his life to start when that happened, when the recognition came. It had taken him twenty years to realize how utterly wrongheaded that was.
It was as if the twenty years didn't amount to much, that he hadn't actually been present for so much of his life. — Graham Joyce

His wife, Genevieve, had her bare feet up on the sofa, exhausted by the responsibility of coordinating the domestic crisis of Christmas in a house with a dreamy husband, four kids, two dogs, a mare in the paddock, a rabbit, and a guinea pig, plus sundry invading mice and rats that kept finding inventive routes into their kitchen. In many ways it was a house weathering a permanent state of siege. — Graham Joyce

The most extraordinary thing about it all was how simple it was just to carry on. There were meals to be prepared and eaten; dishes to be washed; clothes to be laundered, ironed, and put on and taken off; beds to be slept in and made and unmade. The prosaic needs of day-to-day living blunted all impact of the miraculous; it demanded that the glorious be relegated. And she knew that even if she were able to convince everyone involved that she had witnessed something remarkable, had undergone a transcendental and miraculous experience, reached and returned from another world, it almost seemed like it would not ever, and could not ever, truly matter. — Graham Joyce

The sun was up and I want to say that it was golden, but it wasn't golden, it was the color of treacle. I want to say the grass was green, but it wasn't, it was turquoise, the color of a quarry pool. The rocks were lion-colored and glimmered with quartz, and the sky I wanted to call blue was in reality lilac. And the colors were moist. It was as much as I could do to prevent myself from getting off the horse and putting my hands into these colors, to see if they would come off on my fingers. — Graham Joyce