Graham Joyce Quotes

The very people you trusted most could become like strangers in their longing.

You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.

The place was a familiar as breath but as far from his life now as the moon.

It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.

And that point is, it doesn't matter how long you've known somebody. People change. Or you don't really know them as well as you thought you did in the first place.

People grow apart, and sometimes, there nothing anyone can do about it.

I've been thinking a lot about space. It was one of those slow-motion realisations how little we are, how far we are from everything else in our solar system. This idea of distance started kind of haunting me. How do you go forth and accomplish things but not end up leaving everything you started out with in the dust?

There's something quite exciting when you have a history with somebody and you see them do new and different things.

And that's when I understand that I have been stained. Whether I'm still in love with him, whether he was ever in love with me, and no matter who he's in love with now, Willem changed my life. He showed me how to get lost, and then I showed myself how to get found.

Parenting changes your life, it changes how you hear yourself in relationship to others - which is part of the reason that a bunch of people in the rock community are sick of the goodwill and positive energy and love between these 45-year-old musicians who they preferred when they were 25 and taking stabs at each other.

You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.

It really kind of sucked to be close to someone for so long and then suddenly not be anything anymore.

When friends speak overmuch of times gone by, often it's because they sense their present time is turning them from friends to strangers. Long before the moment came to say goodbye, I think, we said goodbye in other words and ways and silences. Then when the moment came for it at last, we didn't say it as should be said by friends. So now at last, dear Mouse, with many, many years between: goodbye.

Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.

We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable.

People are islands,' she said. 'They don't really touch. However close they are, they're really quite separate. Even if they've been married for fifty years.

But in my heart I knew the old Bryce was toast. There was no going back. Not to Garrett or Shelly or Miranda or any of the other people who wouldn't understand. Juli was different, but after all these years that didn't bother me anymore. I liked it. I liked her.

Maybe we've grown out of each other.

A decade is a very long time to be away from somebody.

Lovers need to know how to lose themselves and then how to find themselves again.

I think what is probably hard for people to imagine is how wrapped up the 17 years' work on Harry Potter is with what was going on in my life at the time. I was mourning the loss of this world that I had written for so long and loved so much. I was also mourning the retreat it had been from - from ordinary life, which it has been. And it forced me to look back at 17 years of my life and remember things.

And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?

You can go home again...so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.