Quotes from The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“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

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“What we can imagine as plausible is a narrow band in the middle of a much broader spectrum of what is actually possible. [O]ur eyes are built to cope with a narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies. [W]e can't see the rays outside the narrow light band, but we can do calculations about them, and we can build instruments to detect them. In the same way, we know that the scales of size and time extend in both directions far outside the realm of what we can visualize. Our minds can't cope with the large distances that astronomy deals in or with the small distances that atomic physics deals in, but we can represent those distances in mathematical symbols. Our minds can't imagine a time span as short as a picosecond, but we can do calculations about picoseconds, and we can build computers that can complete calculations within picoseconds. Our minds can't imagine a timespan as long as a million years, let alone the thousands of millions of years that geologists routinely compute. Just as our eyes can see only that narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies that natural selection equipped our ancestors to see, so our brains are built to cope with narrow bands of sizes and times. Presumably there was no need for our ancestors to cope with sizes and times outside the narrow range of everyday practicality, so our brains never evolved the capacity to imagine them. It is probably significant that our own body size of a few feet is roughly in the middle of the range of sizes we can imagine. And our own lifetime of a few decades is roughly in the middle of the range of times we can imagine.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“My love is unique an none can rival her. Just by passing, she has already stolen away my heart.”
― Michelle Moran, quote from Nefertiti

“Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium--
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.--
''[kisses her]''
Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!--
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy, shall Wertenberg be sack'd;
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest;
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
O, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appear'd to hapless Semele;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms;
And none but thou shalt be my paramour!”
― Christopher Marlowe, quote from Dr. Faustus

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