Rachel Joyce > Quotes

“People were buying milk, or filling their cars with petrol, or even posting letters. And what no one else knew was the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The superhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday. The loneliness of that.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“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, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other; and a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had been doing so for a long time.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“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, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“If we don't go mad once in a while, there's no hope.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“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, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“But maybe it's what the world needs. A little less sense, and a little more faith.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“Beginnings could happen more than once, or in different ways.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“It was not a life, if lived without love.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“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, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“He had learned that it was the smallness of people that filled him with wonder and tenderness, and the loneliness of that too. The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other; and a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had been doing it for a long time. 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, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“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, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“All these years I thought a piece of my life was missing. But it was there all along. It was there when I sat beside you in your car and you began to drive. It was there when I sang backwards and you laughed or I made a picnic and you ate every crumb. It was there when you told me you liked my brown suit, when you opened the door for me, when you asked once if I would like to take the long road home. It came later in my garden. When I looked at the sun and saw it glow on my hands. When a rosebud appeared where there had not been one before. It was in the people who stopped and talked of this and that over the garden wall. And just when I thought my life was done, it came time and time again at the hospice. It has been everywhere, my happiness – when my mother sang for me to dance, when my father took my hand to keep me safe – but it was such a small, plain thing that I mistook it for something ordinary and failed to see. We expect our happiness to come with a sign and bells, but it doesn’t.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“Beginnings 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.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“you could be ordinary and attempt something extraordinary, without being able to explain it in a logical way.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“If we can't accept what we don't know, there really is no hope.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“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, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“There is so much to the human mind we don't understand. But, you see, if you have faith, you can do anything.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“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, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“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, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“I've begun to think that we sit far more than we're supposed to...Why else would we have feet?”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“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.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“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.”
― Rachel Joyce, Perfect

“The past was the past; there was no escaping your beginnings.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“The least planned part of the journey, however, was the journey itself.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“He wished the man would honor the true meaning of words, instead of using them as ammunition.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“But it never ceases to amaze me how difficult the things that are supposed to be instinctive really are.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“He understood that in walking to atone for the mistakes he had made, it was his journey to accept the strangeness of others. As a passerby, he was in a place where everything, not only the land, was open. People would feel free to talk, and he was free to listen. To carry a little of them as he went.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“Besides, the big things in life do not present themselves as such. They come in the quiet, ordinary moments-- a phone call, a letter-- they come when we are not looking, without clues, without warning, and that is why they floor us. And it can take a lifetime, a life of many years, to accept the incongruity of things: that a small moment can sit side by side with a big one, and become part of the same.”
― Rachel Joyce, Perfect

“...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 Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry