Quotes from The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Rachel Joyce ·  320 pages

Rating: (122.7K votes)


“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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry


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


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


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


“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, quote from 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, quote from The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry


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


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


“...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, quote from The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry



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


“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 from The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry



“He had felt safe with what he had confided. It had been the same with Queenie. You could say things in the car and know she had tucked them somewhere safe among her thoughts, and that she would not judge him for them, or hold it against him in years to come. He supposed that was what friendship was, and regretted all the years he had spent without it.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry


“Life was very different when you walked through it.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry


“There was no escaping what he had realized as he fought for warmth in the night. With or without him,the moon and the wind would go on, rising and falling. The land would keep stretching ahead until it hit the sea. People would keep dying. It made no difference if Harold walked, or trembled, or stayed at home.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from 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.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry


“You have to believe. That's what I think. It's not about medicine and all that stuff. You have to believe a person can get better. There is so much in the human mind we don't understand. But, you see, if you have faith, you can do anything.”
― Rachel Joyce, quote from The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry



Video

About the author

Rachel Joyce
Born place: The United Kingdom
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“All this to say: I am forty-three years old. I may yet live another forty. What do I do with those years? How do I fill them without Lexy? When I come to tell the story of my life, there will be a line, creased and blurred and soft with age, where she stops. If I win the lottery, if I father a child, if I lose the use of my legs, it will be after she has finished knowing me. "When I get to Heaven", my grandmother used to say, widowed at thirty-nine, "your grandfather won't even recognize me.”
― Carolyn Parkhurst, quote from The Dogs of Babel


“Some things about him are the same as ever. He still looks painfully angelic.”
― Sonya Hartnett, quote from Surrender


“The thing about Web companies is there's always something severely fucked-up. There is always an outage, always lost data, always compromised customer information, always a server going offline. You work with these clugey internal tools and patch together work-arounds to compensate for the half-assed, rushed development, and after a while the fucked-upness of the whole enterprise becomes the status quo. VPs insecure that they're not as in touch as they need to be with conditions on the ground insert themselves into projects midstream and you get serious scope creep. You present to the world this image that you're a buttoned-down tech company with everything in its right place but once you're on the other side of the firewall it looks like triage time in an emergency room, 24/7. Systems break down, laptops go into the blue screen of death, developers miskey a line of code, error messages appear that mean absolutely nothing. The instantaneousness with which you can fix stuff creates a culture that works by the seat of its pants. I swear the whole Web was built by virtue of developers fixing one mistake after another, constantly forced to compensate for the bugginess of their code.”
― Ryan Boudinot, quote from Blueprints Of The Afterlife


“So much of teaching is sharing. Learning results in sharing, sharing results in change, change is learning.”
― Esmé Raji Codell, quote from Educating Esmé: Diary of a Teacher's First Year


“I hated the term "heartbroken." It was such an understatement. "Broken" typically implied you were talking about something you could put back together. Or replace. My heart didn't feel like it was broken. It felt like it had been tossed into the blender and liquidized at 180 MPH.”
― Rachel K. Burke, quote from Sound Bites


Interesting books

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge
(10.3K)
The Great Bridge: Th...
by David McCullough
The War of Mists
(453)
The War of Mists
by Robert Fanney
The Sea of Trolls
(13.4K)
The Sea of Trolls
by Nancy Farmer
Penitence
(1.1K)
Penitence
by Jennifer Laurens
I, Jedi
(10.5K)
I, Jedi
by Michael A. Stackpole
The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
(111.6K)
The Happiness Projec...
by Gretchen Rubin

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.