Top 40 Julia Armfield Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

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

— Julia Armfield

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

— Julia Armfield

5. “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

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

— Julia Armfield

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

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

— Julia Armfield

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “Carmen’s ex-boyfriend Tom was a social worker and weekend DJ who eventually left her for reasons I never quite managed to grasp. Carmen typically speaks about him the way one might refer to a degree: a three-year period one has to endure in order to talk with overbearing authority on exactly one subject. She is the world’s living expert on loving and losing thirty-year-old men named Tom.”

— Julia Armfield

16. “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

17. “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

18. “Sleeping gave me time off from myself – a delicious sort of respite. Without it I grow overfamiliar, sticky with self-contempt.”

— Julia Armfield

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

— 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. Even trapped as I was down there, I was still doing this: taking everything in with one eyeo n how to recount it.”

— Julia Armfield

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

— Julia Armfield

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

— Julia Armfield

23. “What persists after this is only air and water and me between them, not quite either and with one foot straining for the sand.”

— Julia Armfield

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

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

— Julia Armfield

30. “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

31. “Having people be kind to you is so important, but it’s also incredibly irritating. It’s hard to find the balance of what you’re actually able to accept without wanting to hit someone.”

— Julia Armfield

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “Miri said this to me once: Every horror movie ends the way you know it will.”

— Julia Armfield

42. “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

43. “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

44. “I nodded, understanding what he was saying but somehow unable to get my mind off the octopus, the tight but forgiving press of a creature strong enough to break my bones and yet choosing not to.”

— Julia Armfield

45. “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

46. “What you have to understand,” she says, “is that things can thrive in unimaginable conditions. All they need is the right sort of skin.”

— Julia Armfield

47. “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