Rachel Joyce Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

My father had spent years fighting cancer of the head and neck. He had numerous operations, and he was reduced and reduced and reduced. By the end, he had a growth so big under his eye that it hurt to look at him.

Hashtag Harold Fry. Hashtag Queenie Hennessy. Hashtag unlikely pilgrimage. Hashtag hospice. Hashtag respect. Hashtag live forever. I don't know. Your names seem to be all over the place.

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.

Even when it's sunny I can't enjoy it. I think to myself, Oh yes, it's nice now, but it's not going to last. I'm either watching rain, or waiting for it.

But maybe it's what the world needs. A little less sense, and a little more faith.

Like music, said Peg. Even when it was over, it kept living inside you.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Despite his obligation to other people, he wished at that moment he had walls.

If only memory were a library with everything stored where it should be. If only you could walk to the desk and say to the assistant, I'd like to return the painful memories about David Fry or indeed his mother and take out some happier ones, please. About stickleback fishing with my father. Or picnicking on the banks of the Cherwell when I was a student. And the assistant would say, Certainly, madam. We have all those. Under "F" for "Fishing." As well as "P" for "Picnicking." You'll find them on your left.

There was a time when I wished it would stop, when I tried to forget, but forgetting took such strength it was easier to accept you were a missing part of me and get on with life.

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.

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

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

It had been unbearable to hear those things, and even though she had wept in his arms afterwards, and apologized, they were in the air when he was alone, and there was no unsaying them.

(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.

On he went, one foot in front of the other. Now that he accepted the slowness of himself, he took pleasure in the distance he covered.

October passed. Leaves that his mother had once looked at loosened from the trees and twisted through the air, gathering in a slippery carpet at Byron's feet.

Maybe the clever people are not the ones who think they're clever. Maybe the clever people are the ones who accept that they know nothing.

He had felt safe with what he had confided. It had been 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.

You have to think bigger than what you know, James

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.

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

And he wonders if that is what people look for in a partner or a friend: the part of themselves that is missing.

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

All in all, I'd heard people do a lot of things with words. I'd heard them not say what they meant and I'd seen them not do what they said, but I'd never met a person who could speak so simply and still convey so much.

But sometimes you don't say the word because you think a thing is ongoing when actually it is already over. The

Sometimes I think depression must be like a dance in your head and anything can trigger it, if you know that dance.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Real love was a journey with many pitfalls and complications and sometimes the place you ended up was not the one you hoped for.

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.

The letter that would change everything arrived on a Tuesday.

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

Harold believed his journey was truly beginning. He had thought it started the moment he decided to walk to Berwick, but he saw now that he had been naïve. Beginning could happen more than once, or in different ways. You could think you were starting something afresh, when actually what you were doing was carrying on as before. he had faced his shortcomings and overcome them, and so the real business of walking was happening only now.

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

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.

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

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

Paula says that the problem is that people like Jim are too good. And he knows that the problem is not them. The problem is that people need other people (like Eileen) to be too bad.

My dad was always busy. You would pop round for a cup of tea, and within minutes you would see him walking past with a step-ladder. He was always fixing things.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

There was no escaping what he had realized as he fought for warmth in the night. With or without him,the moon and the wind would go on, rising and falling. The land would keep stretching ahead until it hit the sea. People would keep dying. It made no difference if Harold walked, or trembled, or stayed at home.

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.

In the end, it makes no difference who you are. It's friends that count.

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.

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

I'm drawn to people who find themselves on the outside of things. I'm moved by that in real life.

As writers, we must do everything we can to make a world that stands up as if it could be a real one. Not necessarily the real one; not necessarily the world the reader knows. But within its own confines, that world must be plausible. It must add up. After that, the reader meets you halfway. The reader fills out your words with pictures, with breath, with feeling. CR:

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.

They had offered him comfort and shelter, even when he was afraid of taking them, and in accepting he had learned something new. It was as much of a gift to receive as it was to give, requiring as it did both courage and humility.

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

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

I still remember the winter sky that evening. Whenever I worked in my sea garden and I saw a sunset like that, I'd think back to Bantham Beach. It was as if the sun had been torn open. Everything was scarlet. The clouds were flames, so wild and vibrant that blue didn't look like a color anymore. The sea and land served as a mirror. The ribbed sand was on fire. So were the stones and maroon rock pools. The pink crests of the waves. The burning hump of Burgh Island.

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.")

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.

Jim looks out the car window with his nose pressed to the glass. Sometimes he pretends to be asleep. Not because he is tired, but because he needs to be quiet.

Sister Lucy is one of the kindest young women I've met. When it comes to French manicures and blow-drying, she has no equal. But I don't believe the poor girl has ever seen a map of England.
No wonder she is challenged by her jigsaw.

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

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.

It was a perfect spring day. The air was sweet and gentle and the sky stretched high, an intense blue. Harold was certain that the last time he had peered through the net drapes of Fossebridge Road (his home), the trees and hedges were dark bones and spindles against the skyline; yet now that he was out, and on his feet, it was as if everywhere he looked, the fields, gardens, trees, and hedgerows and exploded with growth. 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. The first of the potato shoots fingered through the soil, and already tiny buds hung from the gooseberry and currant shrubs like the earrings Maureen used to wear. The abundance of new life was enough to make him giddy.

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

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.

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.

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.

The fact was, it was safer to stay uninvolved. He was perfectly fine with emotions, so long as they belonged to other people. Oh, he tried relationships after Peg's death, for a while he really tried, but he couldn't bear to get closed ... [it was easier] to disconnect from that part of life and turn his back on love altogether.Easier to find what he needed in music.

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

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

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

He was both inside and outside what he saw; that he was both connected and passing through ... both a part of things, and not.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He watched the squares of buttery light inside the houses, and people going about their business. He thought of how they would settle in their beds and try to sleep through their dreams. It struck him again how much he cared, and how relieved he was that they were somehow safe and warm while he was free to keep walking.

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

I admit I am wearing the wrong clothes. And I also admit I have not the training, or the physique, for my walk. I can't explain why I think I can get there, when all the odds are against it. 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.

Don't care what anyone tells me. The future's vinyl,' he said ... Life has surface noise! Do you want to listen to furniture polish?

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

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.

The fact is that something has changed. It isn't that he has become more likable or any less strange, but the accident has accentuated the fragility of things. If this could happen to Jim, it could happen to any one of them. Consequently the café staff have decided that Jim's strangeness is a part of themselves, and they must protect it.

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