Top 80 Julia Armfield Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.”

— Julia Armfield

2. “I enjoy these, too, I suppose, enjoy their fabulism, the lunar tones of teeth.”

— Julia Armfield

3. “In the morning, I told the woman messaging me on the dating site that I couldn’t talk to her just yet; I was sweeping the bones of a girl I had loved off the kitchen floor.”

— Julia Armfield

4. “In the midst of all these haunted people, she sat alone, without a ghost yet longing for one, her writing like a clasp of fingers around empty air.”

— Julia Armfield

5. “She was a gentle sort of horror...”

— Julia Armfield

6. “The space around us is a claw half grasped, holding tight without quite crushing, and I wish, in the idle way I always wish these days, that I felt more confident in my ability to breathe.”

— Julia Armfield

7. “There’s a point between the sea and the air that is both and also not quite either. Does that make sense? I’m talking about the point at the very top of the ocean that is constantly evaporating and condensing, where water yearns toward air and air yearns toward water. I think about this sometimes, that middle place, the struggle of one thing twisting into another and back again.”

— Julia Armfield

8. “You think you aren’t able to love, except that of course you are. You think you aren’t able to love correctly or the same as everyone else, except that of course you are, you just haven’t had a chance to do it yet. You’re not special, you’re just waiting.”

— Julia Armfield

9. “I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left.”

— Julia Armfield

10. “The problem with relationships between women is that neither one of you is automatically the wronged party, which frankly takes a lot of the fun out of an argument.”

— Julia Armfield

11. “Ghosts don’t speak,′ she said to me. ‘People misunderstand this. They think that when you’re haunted you hear someone speaking but you don’t. Or not usually. Most of the time, if you hear something speaking, it’s not a ghost – it’s something worse.”

— Julia Armfield

12. “I used to think it was vital to know things, to feel safe in the learning and recounting of facts. I used to think it was possible to know enough to escape from the panic of not knowing, but I realise now that you can never learn enough to protect yourself, not really.”

— Julia Armfield

13. “My heart is a thin thing, these days – shred of paper blown between the spaces in my ribs.”

— Julia Armfield

14. “It is easier, I think, to consider the fact of us in its many disparate pieces, as opposed to one vast and intractable thing. Easier, I think, to claw through the scatter of us in the hopes of retrieving something, of pulling some singular thing from the debris and holding it up to the light.”

— Julia Armfield

15. “She refused almost every aspect of my help, the way women will when they’ve been bred to accept little more than the baset civility.”

— Julia Armfield

16. “When something bad is actually happening, it’s easy to underreact, because a part of you is wired to assume it isn’t real. When you stop underreacting, the horror is unique because it is, unfortunately, endless.”

— Julia Armfield

17. “Standing at the place where one fades into the other, I have always been sure that I feel it: the sudden confusion. The air drawing taut between one stage and another. Looking out across the water and feeling my feet connected to something more solid than the plunging uncertainty beyond, I have always felt weighted, literal, a tangible creature connected to the earth.”

— Julia Armfield

18. “Leah is prone to ring the bath with a scrim of some curiously viscous material, oddly gritty when rolled between finger and thumb and pinkish in the white bathroom light. When I look at it, I think of tide pools filled with spiny creatures, scrub at it before running the taps again to clear the debris, little rock pool remains of something that might be shell or might be skin or might be something else entirely.”

— Julia Armfield

19. “Grief is selfish: we cry for ourselves without the person we have lost far more than we cry for the person – but more than that, we cry because it helps. The grief process is also the coping process and if the grief is frozen by ambiguity, by the constant possibility of reversal, then so is the ability to cope.”

— Julia Armfield

20. “In my head, I think I’m often telling Miri stories, logging away information or things I’ve seen in order to tell her about them later.”

— Julia Armfield

21. “From a purely physical perspective, it is hard to love a man without breaking him apart.”

— Julia Armfield

22. “Almost everything that lives in the ocean is also made up of the ocean, to some degree, rather like the way we inherit mitochondrial DNA from our mothers, and our cells likewise hang around in our mothers’ bloodstreams for years after we’re born.”

— Julia Armfield

23. “I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes.”

— Julia Armfield

24. “In truth, we will only perform any action a certain number of times, and to know that can never be helpful. There is, in my opinion, no use in demanding to know the number, in demanding to know upon waking the number of boxes to be ticked off every single day. After all, why would it help to be shown the mathematics of things, when instead we could simply imagine that whatever time we have is limitless.”

— Julia Armfield

25. “I don’t know why I expected you to read my mind,′ I say, when I call back to leave her a message, ‘I was just doing what I always do, assuming the world revolves around me.”

— Julia Armfield

26. “Carmen talks about her bad dates, about arguing with her brothers, about hating her next-door neighbours for always allowing their children to kick balls against the dividing wall, and I listen and I nod and I give her advice and I tell her things are fine with me, that I really can’t complain. I suppose, in the main, this comes from a wish to appear in control, if not to say superior.”

— Julia Armfield

27. “It’s a curious act of surrender, when you think about it, the act of going under. To drop below the surface is still to sink, however intentionally a simple matter of taking on water, just as drowning only requires you to open your mouth.”

— Julia Armfield

28. “When I was twenty-seven, my Sleep stepped out of me like a passenger from a train carriage, looked around my room for several seconds, then sat down in the chair beside my bed.”

— Julia Armfield

29. “What I’m saying is, the pain is in the aftermath, more than it is the break.”

— Julia Armfield

30. “It’s too hard, trying to exist between these poles of hope and death. You just find yourself imagining all these possibilities, all these possible sisters wandering around half unseen like people with sheets over their head, except that somewhere among them, you know that one of them’s real – one of them’s dead, one of them’s the ghost.”

— Julia Armfield

31. “Most nights we don’t talk – silence like a spine through the new shape our relationship has taken.”

— Julia Armfield

32. “Apparently satisfied, Helen turned to grate her jaw along the floorboards; a gesture like a sharpening – serrated knife against a block. The moon, I felt, was not yet full enough to excuse this kind of behaviour, but by degrees nonetheless sat down beside my feral sister and joined her in dragging my teeth across the floor.”

— Julia Armfield

33. “I used to hope, I typed once, that I’d die before my partner, even though I knew that was selfish. I used to think that I hoped I’d die before she died and before the planet died and really just generally before things got any worse.”

— Julia Armfield

34. “I know now, of course, that this was a stupid thing to think, in so far as most things we believe will turn out to be ridiculous in the end.”

— Julia Armfield

35. “When I was younger, I think some glib or cavalier part of me always believed that there was no such thing as heartache – that it was simply a case of things getting in past the ribcage and finding there was no way out. I know now, of course, that this was a stupid thing to think, in so far as most things we believe will turn out to be ridiculous in the end.”

— Julia Armfield

36. “It is not my fault,’ Agnes says after a moment and in an infuriatingly measured voice, ’if you have certain expectations of our relationship that I never invited you to have.”

— Julia Armfield

37. “To stamp a limit on even the most tedious of things – the number of times you will defrost the fridge – is to acknowledge reality in a way that amounts to torture.”

— Julia Armfield

38. “She has a funny impulse to kiss him then, to take his germs or whatever is wrong with him into herself on a long inhalation. A disgusting sort of perversion, love.”

— Julia Armfield

39. “Remember this: the world as it once was. The way things appear in the instant before they go under: first assured, then shipwrecked. The ease with which facts presumed permanent can change.”

— Julia Armfield

40. “There was no sense of haunting, to be honest, only ongoingness, until one day he ceased to appear and I really felt fine about that too.”

— Julia Armfield

41. “You go so deep you forget you’re supposed to come back.”

— Julia Armfield

42. “I typically think it’s easiest to feel warm when a part of us is cold.”

— Julia Armfield

43. “Some time ago, she accidentally winked at a woman while messing around with her contact lenses and the horror of that moment stayed with her well into the end of the day. Embarrassment, the potential for it, like something caught on the sole of the foot and hard to slough off again, a physical object she carries around at all times.”

— Julia Armfield

44. “Really, no one should feel as paralyzingly superior as I do around Carmen, around a lot of people, especially given that in many way I have little enough to back this feeling up. It’s a failing, and one I am aware of.”

— Julia Armfield

45. “It went on too long and too helplessly. The way that anyone who sneezes more than four times abruptly loses the sympathy of an audience, so it was with me and Leah.”

— Julia Armfield

46. “All right,” I say, “I’m listening,” but this apparently demonstrates my tendency toward belligerence and we have to start the exercise again.”

— Julia Armfield

47. “Stepping back too far makes me dizzy – my memory, like something punched, reeling about with its hands clapped over its face.”

— Julia Armfield

48. “The sky is gory with stars, like the insides of a gutted night.”

— Julia Armfield

49. “Loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes.”

— Julia Armfield

50. “I look at her and I feel a collection of curious things, none of which feel quite correct for the circumstances. I feel the coolness I alwavs feel toward strangers, the gentle yawn of distance I still can’t help but preserve, even despite her sharing all of this with me. I feel, too, the blank exhaustion of everything.”

— Julia Armfield