102 Quotes by 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.

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

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.

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.

Again he felt in a profound way that he was both inside and outside what he saw; that he was bith connected, and passing through. Harold began to understand that this was also the truth about his walk. He was both a part of things, and not.

For a while it there was only the silence that carried her words. 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.

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.

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.

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.