Rachel Joyce quotes

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)

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 story of Harold Fry and his unlikely pilgrimage began as an afternoon play for radio. For many years, I have been writing plays and adapting novels for 'Woman's Hour' and the 'Classic' series. So this was originally a three-hander play, broadcast one sunny afternoon on BBC Radio 4.

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

On television, it's all just shiny, successful people, and so I feel somebody has to wave a flag for the ordinary people who are not quite sure that they are getting it right.

Rachel Joyce

We are quick to stick labels on others - especially those who don't fit in with the norm. 'Harold Fry' is about a broken marriage; 'Perfect' is about a broken person. They are both about finding kindness where you least expect it.

Rachel Joyce

'Perfect' is about a set-up that looks perfect from the outside - beautiful country house, beautiful wife and mother, everything where it should be - and the deep fissures that, in fact, lie beneath that. 'Perfect' was partly a response to the shock of my first book, 'The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry,' being a success.

Rachel Joyce

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

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

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

Rachel Joyce

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)

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

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

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

Rachel Joyce

The past was the past; there was no escaping your beginnings.

Rachel Joyce

...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

you could be ordinary and attempt something extraordinary, without being able to explain it in a logical way.

Rachel Joyce

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

Rachel Joyce

It was not a life, if lived without love.

Rachel Joyce

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

Rachel Joyce

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

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

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

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

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