Top 80 Julia Armfield Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Once upon a time, she watched a movie in which a man looked at a woman with whom he would never be allowed to live happily, surveyed her face as if surprised by every minute detail. Each time, he said, you happen to me all over again.”

— Julia Armfield

52. “There is no way to love a man. Not well, or rather, not correctly. Maggie knows this and loves him anyway – a vast stupidity of love that a part of her views with a painful sort of irony. Of course you love him, you fool, you idiot. What an utterly moronic thing to go and do.”

— Julia Armfield

53. “The night is cold, white lights, a curve of moon like a finger crooked into a claw.”

— Julia Armfield

54. “Very often, people argue as a way of expressing the fears and frustrations they cannot say aloud.”

— Julia Armfield

55. “I see my mother in myself, though less in the sense of inherited features and more in the sense of an intruder poorly hidden behind a curtain. I see her impatience in the skin of my neck, her anger in the way my hands move. I see her when I press my tongue into the inside of my cheek with irritation yet refuse to do anything to make a situation better. I see her when I assume people are worse than they turn out to be.”

— Julia Armfield

56. “People think it’s just hellfire and brimstone, four horsemen and out, but actually the end times go on and on and on.”

— Julia Armfield

57. “A house, unlatched, is less a house and more a set of rooms through which one might be hunted.”

— Julia Armfield

58. “Any horror story could be said to work in two pieces: the fear of being wholly alone and of realising that one has company.”

— Julia Armfield

59. “I don’t know who I’m writing this for, really. I think I need to explain what happened, but it’s hard when so much of it happened in the dark. I need to talk about the days, and not knowing what was a day, not knowing how to keep track or what it was that separated night from morning, not knowing how to keep ourselves from going mad.”

— Julia Armfield

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

— Julia Armfield

61. “The jellyfish come with the morning – a great beaching, bodies black on sand. The ocean empties, a thousand dead and dying invertebrates, jungled tentacles and fine, fragile membranes blanketing the shore two miles in each direction. They are translucent, almost spectral, as though the sea has exorcised its ghosts.”

— Julia Armfield

62. “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

63. “I watch movies alone now – Leah’s concentration is not what it used to be. When I can’t sleep, which is often, I take myself out of the spare room and watch movies on the living room floor until the sky grows light beyond the telegraph poles and my back starts to hump from sitting so long with my arms curled over my knees. I watch only movies I’ve seen before – impossible, I think, to follow something new, to find the will to do so.”

— Julia Armfield

64. “I see my mother in myself, though less in the sense of inherited features and more in the sense of an intruder poorly hidden behind a curtain.”

— Julia Armfield

65. “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

66. “Is this a haunting? I asked her and she looked at me as if surprised. No, she said, turning the radio down, not technically. More like a manifestation. I accused her of quibbling over semantics and she accused me of being incapable of nuance.”

— Julia Armfield

67. “It’s exhausting, as it always was, to live with such a breadth of things to take up one’s attention–exhausting, the way there can be too much world, even in its final stages. Exhausting, to be so busy and so bored with no time left for either.”

— Julia Armfield

68. “We didn’t speak for three days, during which time I became so panicked at the thought of losing her that I sent her a total of thirty-nine hysterically casual messages – a photograph of my breakfast, a quote from a movie, a long text about which of my trains had been delayed that day.”

— Julia Armfield

69. “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

70. “The nights seemed larger by the age of sixteen, a curious sense that the strangulated skies of my childhood had suddenly been granted room to rage about.”

— Julia Armfield

71. “There are, Irene has always felt, few frustrations to match that of being read a certain way by family members. To be misunderstood is one thing, but the curious hostility of a sibling’s approach lies less in what they miss than in the strange backdated nature of the things they choose to know.”

— Julia Armfield

72. “The problem with love, of course, is that it frequently asks too much of unlovable people. It can be hard, on even the best of days, to compel oneself to be selfless and patient and undemanding or even halfway reasonable when one is not given to any of those behaviours. But these are nonetheless the qualities that love demands.”

— Julia Armfield

73. “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

74. “They couldn’t all be as dreadful as they seemed when she got to know them, or else why would anyone marry them, want to have them near? Prolonged contact, she had reasoned when slick with chardonnay, deep in the self-pitying vein, that must be it. Too long with me and they all turn, become worse.”

— Julia Armfield

75. “To be misunderstood is one thing, but the curious hostility of a sibling’s approach lies less in what they miss than in the strange backdated nature of the things they choose to know. A person can be thirty, thirty-five, and yet still largely described by her sisters in terms of things which happened to be true at the age of seventeen.”

— Julia Armfield

76. “Sometimes the journey is his own quest for the holy land and sometimes the journey’s a punishment. He does something wrong and so an angel sets him out onto the ocean and makes him sail for nine years. Heavy-handed, but then things to do with angels usually are.”

— Julia Armfield

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

— Julia Armfield

78. “Phones are how people reach you, and nothing very good can come from that.”

— Julia Armfield

79. “The key, she has been taught by the books she reads, is to love a man slightly less than he loves you. That way you remain in some sense unreachable. An inch above the floor.”

— Julia Armfield

80. “Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.”

— Julia Armfield

81. “Things continue. This is something I have always found: unfortunately, things go on.”

— Julia Armfield

82. “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

83. “Sometimes in the dark, I imagine I hear Leah knocking on the wall that separates us, neat little knocks that request not entry but only conversation. Not real, of course, but something to occupy my mind when my home seems to fill with water and I find myself without the correct materials to plug the gaps.”

— Julia Armfield

84. “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

85. “We love people before we notice we love them, but the act of naming the love makes it different, drags it out into different light.”

— Julia Armfield

86. “I feel exhausted, a feeling of catching up, a feeling of something finding me.”

— Julia Armfield

87. “I used to imagine the sea as something that seethed and then quieted, a froth of activity tampering down into the dark and still. I know now that this isn’t how it goes, that things beneath the surface are what have to move and change to cause the chain reaction higher up.”

— Julia Armfield

88. “The problem isn’t that she went away, it’s that nothing about her going away felt normal. It isn’t that her being back is difficult, it’s that I’m not convinced she’s really back at all.”

— Julia Armfield

89. “I must have taken that book down from my father’s shelf more times than he considered strictly polite, because at one point I pulled it out and found he had printed his name on the inside cover: Property of Michael Henry Frayne, on long lease to his daughter Leah.”

— Julia Armfield