Graham Joyce > Quotes

“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

“There is no "mid" about it. Life is a crisis from the cradle to the grave.”
― Graham Joyce, How to Make Friends with Demons

“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, Some Kind of Fairy Tale

“The trouble with forgiveness is that some people don't want to be forgiven.”
― Graham Joyce, How to Make Friends with Demons

“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, Some Kind of Fairy Tale

“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, Some Kind of Fairy Tale

“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, Some Kind of Fairy Tale

“The modern superstition is that we're free of superstition.”
― Graham Joyce, Some Kind of Fairy Tale

“The blood in my veins is frozen but it sings of love.”
― Graham Joyce, The Silent Land

“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, Some Kind of Fairy Tale

“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 Silent Land

“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 Some Kind of Fairy Tale

“Why can’t our job here on earth be simply to inspire each other?”
― 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, Some Kind of Fairy Tale

“She couldn't see him, but his voice was like light through a stained-glass window in a cathedral.”
― Graham Joyce, The Silent Land

“Perhaps living souls had greater phantom powers than the dead.”
― Graham Joyce, Some Kind of Fairy Tale

“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 Silent Land

“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, Some Kind of Fairy Tale

“Some people feed you with love.”
― Graham Joyce, Some Kind of Fairy Tale

“He looked like a once-green leaf that had begun to dry and to reveal the structure of its veins.”
― Graham Joyce, Some Kind of Fairy Tale

“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, The Silent Land

“The mist hung in the air like a prancing unicorn.”
― Graham Joyce, The Silent Land

“Through the window a broken fingernail of moon was visible.”
― Graham Joyce, The Tooth Fairy

“...demons do tend to cluster around the yellowing pages and cracked spines of second hand books.”
― Graham Joyce, How to Make Friends with Demons

“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, Some Kind of Fairy Tale

“Of course, everything depends on who is telling the story. It always does.”
― Graham Joyce, Some Kind of Fairy Tale

“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

“Go deep within yourself and be fearless in search of the treasure you are but have momentarily forgotten.”
― Graham Joyce, House of Lost Dreams

“I am less interested in ghosts than in people who see ghosts.”
― 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, The Silent Land