Quotes from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“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, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“I found out what was right only by getting it wrong.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“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, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“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, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“Sometimes you cannot clear the past completely. You must live alongside your sorrow.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“Sometimes, Harold, the way forward takes you by surprise. You try to force something in the familiar direction and discover that what it needs is to move in a different dimension. The way forward is not forward, but off to one side, in a place you have not noticed before.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“It is no good thinking about how life will get better once you have a new television or a new job. You must stop hoping for change. You must simply be it.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“Waiting is about being still. You can’t keep busy every minute, otherwise you’re not waiting. You’re just throwing things around to distract yourself.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“Perhaps I took my mother more literally than she intended, but I applied her rule to my life; after all, we are all searching for them, the rules. We pick them up from the strangest places, and if they appear to work once we can live a whole lifetime by them, regardless of the unhappiness and difficulty they may later bring.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“So you see, people are rarely the straightforward things we think they are. Even the villains in a story can turn round and surprise us.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“PEOPLE CAN LOVE in different ways,” I told David. “You can love full-on, with a lot of noise, or you can do it quietly, over the washing-up. You can even love a person without them knowing.” I was careful to turn away.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“I’d made my sea garden to atone for the terrible wrong I had done to a man I loved, I said. Sometimes you have to do something with your pain because otherwise it will swallow”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“Sometimes you 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, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“It is a hard thing, as I said, this learning to love. But it is an even harder thing, I think, to learn to be ordinary.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“Sometimes a person can smile when you are feeling only the difficulty of a thing and the problem unravels before your eyes and becomes straightforward.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“They were a delicious bunch but always forgetting the sensible things like food and daylight and remembering only the more intoxicating ones like love and gin.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“I had to get away from him. Sometimes we reject the people who tell the truth and it is not because they are wrong. It is because we can’t”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“When I first met you, I was ready. I had a space for you.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“If only memory were a library with everything stored where it should be. If only you could walk to the desk and say to the assistant, I’d like to return the painful memories about David Fry or indeed his mother and take out some happier ones, please. About stickleback fishing with my father. Or picnicking on the banks of the Cherwell when I was a student. And the assistant would say, Certainly, madam. We have all those. Under “F” for “Fishing.” As well as “P” for “Picnicking.” You’ll find them on your left.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“I just want someone to see me, Q. See who I really am.” It is what we all want, in the end; to be seen.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“Don’t try to see ahead to the nice bits. Don’t try to see ahead to the end. Stay with the present, even if it is not so good. And consider how far you’ve already come.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“When a thing is taken away, you see more clearly what it brought to your life...”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“I am starting again, I thought. Because that is what you do when you reach the last stop. You make a new beginning.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“Sometimes, Harold, the way forward takes you by surprise. You try to force something in the familiar direction and discover that what it needs is to move in a different dimension.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“I still remember the winter sky that evening. Whenever I worked in my sea garden and I saw a sunset like that, I'd think back to Bantham Beach. It was as if the sun had been torn open. Everything was scarlet. The clouds were flames, so wild and vibrant that blue didn't look like a color anymore. The sea and land served as a mirror. The ribbed sand was on fire. So were the stones and maroon rock pools. The pink crests of the waves. The burning hump of Burgh Island.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“so many people going about their lives, millions of them, being ordinary, doing ordinary things that no one notices, that no one sings about, but there they are nevertheless, and they are filled with life. I”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“Waiting is about being still. You can't keep busy every minute, otherwise you're not waiting. You're just throwing things around to distract yourself.... 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.... You have to see what you did not see before.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

“Thank fuck that’s over,” said Finty, rubbing at her mouth and her sweatshirt. “Let’s have a game of Scrabble.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

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“Many [book] even lay flat in the floor open. Their spines upward. Elinor couldn't bear to look! Didn't the monster know that was the way to break a book's neck?”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from Inkspell

“A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this?-And-how many of us do know it? Not Lotze. Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up. I suppose only a few are aware of all this. Isolated persons here and there. But the broad masses...what do they think? All these hundreds of thousands in this city, here. Do they imagine that they live in a sane world? Or do they guess, glimpse the truth...?

But, he thought, what does it mean, insane? A legal definition. What do I mean? I feel it, see it, but what is it?

He thought, it is something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn't it. I don't know; I sense it, inuit it. But-they are purposely cruel...is that it? No. God, he thought, I can't find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans. The conquering of the planets. Something frenzied and demented, as was their conquering of Africa, and before that, Europe and Asia.

Their view; it is cosmic. Not of man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honorable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Gute, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And they-these madmen-respond to the granite, the dust, the longing of the inanimate; they want to aid Natur.

And, he thought, I know why. They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God's power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archetype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. it is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate-confusion between him who worships and that which is worshiped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.

What they do not comprehend is man's helplessness. I am weak, small, of no consequence to the universe. It does not notice me; I live on unseen. But why is that bad? Isn't it better that way? Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small...and you will escape the jealousy of the great.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from The Man in the High Castle

“I want to be able to love you more than I fear losing you”
― Mia Sheridan, quote from Archer's Voice

“For a moment I had felt elation as on the instant of waking before one remembers.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Quiet American

“The general, whom the boys knew as the commander of their division, looked at the other officer and spoke coolly, as if he were criticising his clothes. "Th' enemy's formin' over there for another charge," he said. "It'll be directed against Whiterside, an' I fear they'll break through there unless we work like thunder t' stop them." The other swore at his restive horse, and then cleared his throat. He made a gesture toward his cap. "It'll be hell t' pay stoppin' them," he said shortly. "I presume so," remarked the general. Then he began to talk rapidly and in a lower tone. He frequently illustrated his words with a pointing finger. The two infantrymen could hear nothing until finally he asked: "What troops can you spare?" The officer who rode like a cowboy reflected for an instant. "Well," he said, "I had to order in th' 12th to help th' 76th, an' I haven't really got any. But there's th' 304th. They fight like a lot 'a mule drivers. I can spare them best of any." The youth and his friend exchanged glances of astonishment. The general spoke sharply. "Get 'em ready, then. I'll watch developments from here, an' send you word when t' start them. It'll happen in five minutes." As the other officer tossed his fingers toward his cap and wheeling his horse, started away, the general called out to him in a sober voice: "I don't believe many of your mule drivers will get back." The other shouted something in reply. He smiled. With scared faces, the youth and his companion hurried back to the line. These happenings had occupied an incredibly short time, yet the youth felt that in them he had been made aged. New eyes were given to him. And the most startling thing was to learn suddenly that he was very insignificant. The officer spoke of the regiment as if he referred to a broom. Some part of the woods needed sweeping, perhaps, and he merely indicated a broom in a tone properly indifferent to its fate. It was war, no doubt, but it appeared strange.”
― Stephen Crane, quote from The Red Badge of Courage

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