The collection / 30 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

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

Rachel Joyce / quote

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02Undated

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.

Rachel Joyce / quote

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03Undated

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.

Rachel Joyce / quote

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04Undated

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

Rachel Joyce / quote

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05Undated

Jazz was about the spaces between notes. It was about what happened when you listened to the thing inside you. The gaps and the cracks. Because that was where life really happened, when you were brave enough to free-fall.

Rachel Joyce / quote

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06Undated

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

Rachel Joyce / quote

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07Undated

The regrets about all she had let go flooded her. Where had all that enterprise gone? All that energy? Why had she never traveled? Or had more sex when she could? She had bleached and annihilated every waking moment of the last twenty years. Anything, rather than feel.

Rachel Joyce / quote

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08Undated

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.

Rachel Joyce / quote

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09Undated

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.

Rachel Joyce / quote

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10Undated

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 / quote

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11Undated

Mrs. Sussex said Byron’s loss would grow more bearable. But here was the nub: he didn’t want to lose his loss. Loss was all he had left of his mother. If time healed the gap, it would be as if she’d never been there.

Rachel Joyce / quote

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12Undated

Sometimes caring for something already growing is more perilous than planting something new.

Rachel Joyce / quote

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13Undated

Sometimes you cannot clear the past completely. You must live alongside your sorrow.

Rachel Joyce / quote

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14Undated

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 / quote

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15Undated

If I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, it stands to reason that I'm going to get there.

Rachel Joyce / quote

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16Undated

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 in your tracks and admire the view, a small cloud and a tree outside your window. You have to see what you did not see before. And then you have to sleep.

Rachel Joyce / quote

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17Undated

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.

Rachel Joyce / quote

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18Undated

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

Rachel Joyce / quote

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19Undated

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. 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 overcame them, and so the real business of walking was happening only now.

Rachel Joyce / quote

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20Undated

He saw the reflection of her face in a compact mirror as she painted on her re lips. She did it with such care, he had felt she was trapping something behind the colour.She had touched life, played with it a little, bit it was a slippery bugger,and finally we must close the door, and leave it behind.

Rachel Joyce / quote

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21Undated

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.

Rachel Joyce / quote

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22Undated

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.

Rachel Joyce / quote

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23Undated

The sky and the sun are always there. It's the clouds that come and go.

Rachel Joyce / quote

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24Undated

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.

Rachel Joyce / quote

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