Rachel Joyce Quotes & Sayings

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

How oft," he murmured, "when men are at the point of death have they been merry! — Rachel Joyce

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

Maybe it was as simple as believing things were what you wanted them to be? Maybe that was all it took? If there was anything Byron had learned that summer, it was that a thing was capable of being not one but many different things, and some of them contradictory. Not everything had a label. Or if it did, you had to be prepared to re-examine that label from time to time and paste another alongside it. The truth could be true, but not in a definite way. It could be more or less true; and maybe that was the best a human being could hope for. — Rachel Joyce

I never saw you without a golf club tie.
I never saw you with a golf club.
I never saw you without yachting shoes.
I never saw you in a yacht. — Rachel Joyce

The place was not cruel. It was worse. It didn't notice. — 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

Why do you need someone else to tell you what you are? Why can't you just write for the sake of writing? You don't have to be famous to do those things. — Rachel Joyce

He felt safe with what he had confided. It was the same with Queenie. You could say things in the car and know she had tucked them somewhere safe among her thoughts, and that she would not judge him for them, or hold it against him in years to come. He supposed that was what friendship was, and regretted all the years he had spent without it."
p. 201 — Rachel Joyce

Time was what held the world together. It kept life as it should be. — Rachel Joyce

To explain is sometimes to diminish. And what does it matter if I believe one thing and you believe another? We share the same end. — Rachel Joyce

I tell you only because in my pregnancy I had discovered a new way to love, freely and joyfully and without expectation. — Rachel Joyce

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

Even if we don't believe in church or God, we still believe in things that are bigger than ourselves. We need to believe in those things because if we can't be open to what we don't know, there's no hope for any of us. — Rachel Joyce

I actually hate Christmas," says Eileen. "Everybody has this idea you have to have a good time, like happiness comes in a ruddy packet." Her face is flushed with heat. "One time, I stayed in bed all day. That was one of my best Christmases. — Rachel Joyce

He had always been too English; by which he supposed he meant that he was ordinary. — Rachel Joyce

PEOPLE CAN LOVE in different ways," I told David. "You can love full-on, with a lot of noise, or you can do it quietly, over the washing-up. You can even love a person without them knowing." I was careful to turn away. — Rachel Joyce

Sometimes you have to do something with your pain because otherwise it will swallow you. — Rachel Joyce

He thought of that half-forgotten world lived in houses and streets and cars, where people ate three times a day, slept by night, and kept each other company. He was glad they were safe, and he was glad too that he was at last outside them. — Rachel Joyce

In writing about Harold and Maureen with their terrible unspoken secret, and all those people that Harold meets as he walks to save a friend's life, I was trying to celebrate the ordinary people. — Rachel Joyce

Even the potted fern seemed to hold its breath. Harold — Rachel Joyce

Before I gave birth to Hope, I had a miscarriage. The pain was so enormous, I had to write myself out of it. I kept a diary and did not feel entirely complete until Hope was born. — Rachel Joyce

Houses don't clean themselves, she'd mutter. Sometimes she cleaned the bits she had just cleaned. It wasn't like living in a house, but more a question hovering over the surfaces. — Rachel Joyce

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

One of the pluses of chemotherapy, she tells the volunteers, is that all her facial and body hair has gone. It's like a permanent Brazilian for free, she says. One of the minuses of chemotherapy is that all the stuff on top of her head has gone too. ("What is a Brazilian?" Sister Lucy asked the other day. Finty gulped and looked for help, but the Pearly King was studying a parcel and Barbara had lost one of her glass eyes again in her lap. "It's a sort of haircut," said Finty. "Quite short.") — Rachel Joyce

They believed in him. They had looked at him in his yachting shoes, and listened to what he said, and they had made a decision in their hearts and minds to ignore the evidence and to imagine something bigger and something infinitely more beautiful than the obvious. — Rachel Joyce

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

Sometimes a person can smile when you are feeling only the difficulty of a thing and the problem unravels before your eyes and becomes straightforward. — Rachel Joyce

The sky and the sun are always there. It's the clouds that come and go. — Rachel Joyce

But it never ceases to amaze me how difficult the things that are supposed to be instinctive really are. — Rachel Joyce

(She cupped his face in her palms.) They were so close now that his features lost distinction and all she could see was the feeling she had for him. — Rachel Joyce

So long as I could see you every weekday, I was happy to love you from the sidelines. — 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

You don't get to a place by constantly moving, even if your journey is only one of sitting still and waiting. Every once in a while you have to stop your tracks and admire the view, a small cloud an a tree outside your window — Rachel Joyce

Sometimes you cannot clear the past completely. You must live alongside your sorrow. — Rachel Joyce

The past was the past; there was no escaping your beginnings. — Rachel Joyce

Endings, it seems, are not all they're cracked up to be. — Rachel Joyce

I've begun to think that we sit far more than we're supposed to ... Why else would we have feet? — Rachel Joyce

He walked for surely it was as if all his life he had been waiting to get up from his chair. — Rachel Joyce

The people he met, the places he passed, were all steps in his journey, and he kept a place inside his heart for each of them. — Rachel Joyce

Life is very different when you walked through it...How was it he never noticed all this before? — Rachel Joyce

I loved you and you didn't know. I loved you and that was enough. — Rachel Joyce

It was the same with time, he thought, and also sorrow. They were both waiting to catch you. And no matter how much you shook your arms at them and hollered, they knew they were bigger. They knew they would get you in the end. — Rachel Joyce

Harold thought of the people he had already met on his journey. All of them were different, but none of them struck him as strange. He considered his own life and how ordinary it might look from the outside, when really it held such darkness and trouble. "I don't think you're crazy," he said."
p. 203 — 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

That's what nobody realizes. Two seconds are huge. It's the difference between something happening and something not happening. You could take one step too many and fall over the edge of a cliff. It's very dangerous. — Rachel Joyce

My mother's view on love appalled me. It suggested love had more in common with the boiling of an egg than the discovery of another person from whom one couldn't bear to live apart — Rachel Joyce

I think lots of ideas are sometimes in our heads without us quite, you know, knowing it. — Rachel Joyce

He went under the stars, and the tender light of the moon, when it hung like an eyelash and the tree trunks shone like bones. He walked through wind and weather, and beneath sun-bleached skies. It seemed to Harold that he had been waiting all his life to walk. He no longer knew how far he had come, but only that he was going forward. The pale Cotswold stone became the red brick of Warwickshire, and the land flattened into middle England. Harold reached his hand to his mouth to brush away a fly, and felt a beard growing in thick tufts. Queenie would live. He knew it. — Rachel Joyce

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

He wished the man would honor the true meaning of words, instead of using them as ammunition. — Rachel Joyce

He saw the reflection of her face in a compact mirror as she painted on her re lips. She did it with such care, he had felt she was trapping something behind the colour.
She had touched life, played with it a little, bit it was a slippery bugger,and finally we must close the door, and leave it behind. — Rachel Joyce

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

It was not a life, if lived without love. — Rachel Joyce

The nudity of his words took him by surprised, as if it were Harold himself who was wearing no clothes. — Rachel Joyce

For me, writing is such an escape, and I felt very lucky to have this to run away to. — Rachel Joyce

This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in different people's minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader's experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up. — Rachel Joyce

He saw that 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. He — Rachel Joyce

Years later I applied for Oxford University, and I suppose you could say that in this way I escaped from my parents. Being their sole child had become too complicated. — Rachel Joyce

In order to succeed he must remain true to the feeling that had inspired him in the first place. It didn't matter that other people would do it in a different way; in fact this was inevitable. He would keep to the roads because, despite the odd fast car, he felt safer there. It didn't matter that he had no mobile phone. It didn't matter that he had not planned his route, or brought a road map. He had a different map, and that was the one in his mind, made up of all the people and places he had passed. He would also stick to his yachting shoes because, despite the wear and tear, they were his. He saw that when a person becomes estranged from the things they know, and is a passerby, strange things take on a new significance. And knowing this, it seemed important to allow himself to be true to the instincts that made him Harold, as opposed to anyone else. — Rachel Joyce

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

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

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

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

After the two drinks, she felt warm inside, and slightly indistinct at the edges. — 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

I'm sure that everything you do contributes to the sort of novel that you write. A lot of actors have an understanding of drama and a good ear for dialogue and also the rhythm of speech. Similarly, my 16 years in radio drama has influenced me. You only have 45 minutes, or 7,000 words, to tell a story, so every scene has to have a point. — 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

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

Every morning there were silver snail trails crisscrossing the hall. There were cobwebs like soft clouds and pepperings of mold at the windowsills. The moor was coming inside. — Rachel Joyce

I knew then that you would always see the positive side because you liked people, and you wanted the best for them. It was intoxicating. — 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

Time was something altogether more fragmented than it had been before. It was like throwing a handful of feathers into the air and watching them drift. Moments no longer flowed from one to the other. — Rachel Joyce

A canopy of sticky young leaves clung to the branches above him. There were startling yellow clouds of forsythia, trails of purple aubrietia; a young willow shook in a fountain of silver. — Rachel Joyce

He hunched his shoulders and drove his feet harder, as if he wasn't so much walking to Queenie as away from himself. — Rachel Joyce

Besides, I was thrown by your eyes. The blue of them was so generous, I couldn't quite think of anything else. — 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

If we can't accept what we don't know, there really is no hope. — Rachel Joyce

He understood that in walking to atone for the mistakes he had made, it was also his journey to accept the strangeness of others. — Rachel Joyce

Mind where you're going, people muttered at me. I hated them, but really the person I hated was myself. I fled. — 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

Silently he had moved within her until deep inside she opened like a flower. — Rachel Joyce

Time would heal, Mrs. Sussex said. Byron's loss would grow more bearable. But here was the crux. He didn't want to lose his loss. Loss was all he had left of his mother. If time healed the gap, it would be as if she had never been there. One — 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

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

The regrets about all she had let go flooded her. Where had all that enterprise gone? All that energy? Why had she never traveled? Or had more sex when she could? She had bleached and annihilated every waking moment of the last twenty years. Anything, rather than feel. — Rachel Joyce

Needed the very famous actor to know that you could be ordinary and attempt something extraordinary, without being able to explain it in a logical way. But — Rachel Joyce

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

He had never been good at expressing himself. What he felt was so big it was difficult to find the words, and even if he could, it was hardly appropriate to write them to someone he had not contacted in twenty years. — Rachel Joyce

The pewter sea lay behind, while ahead of him was all the land that led to Berwick, where once again there would be sea. He had started; and in doing so Harold could already see the end. — Rachel Joyce

Mrs. Sussex said Byron's loss would grow more bearable. But here was the nub: he didn't want to lose his loss. Loss was all he had left of his mother. If time healed the gap, it would be as if she'd never been there. — Rachel Joyce

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

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 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

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

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

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