Julia Armfield Books & Quotes

“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.”

Love Heartbreak Heartache

Book:Our Wives Under the Sea

Source: Our Wives Under the Sea

“When they had first fallen in love, she had kissed him with an intensity which imagined him already halfway out of the door. A grasping period - nights spent holding him overlong and too tightly, the ravenous dig of fingers into skin.”

Love Fear Relationship Abandonment

Book:Salt Slow

Source: Salt Slow

“When she was a child, she had inherited a ratty canvas tent which her mother had allowed her to drag down from the attic and sit inside. The thrill of a pretended journey had been enough to entertain her for days at time, zipped up with her books and a beakerful of cramberry juice, imagining strange shadows dancing on the fabric walls. You liked it because you liked four walls around you, her mother told her later, you liked to have things where you could see them - your little books and toys and pencils - to zip them up with you and keep them close.”

Home Childhood Camping Playing Belongings

Book:Salt Slow

Source: Salt Slow

“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.”

Love Relationship Leaving Abandonment

Book:Salt Slow

Source: Salt Slow

“That night, she had slept in strange hot fits on his futon and woken in the red-eye of the morning to find herself alone, realising after several bleary moments that he had left the room and closed the door behind him. [...] A very slender sort of betrayal, the deliberate absence from a room.”

Relationship Pregnancy Abandonment

Book:Salt Slow

Source: Salt Slow

“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.”

Relationship Suffocating Cohabitation

Book:Our Wives Under the Sea

Source: Our Wives Under the Sea

“She knew herself for what she was: a great failure at solitude. Sluicing through her twenties illuminated only by the glow of terrestrial television, finding much to her dismay at the age of twenty-nine that she longed to be amused and to be longed for. A faint life. Eating apricots and growing bony and forgetting how to talk to people. Loneliness like a taste on the skin.”

Loneliness Solitude Twenties

Book:Salt Slow

Source: Salt Slow

“She had often wondered whether solitude was a skill one could lose, like schoolgirl latin, or whether it was simply a talent one acquired, bike-like, never afterwards forgotten.”

Loneliness Solitude

Book:Salt Slow

Source: Salt Slow

“Finding points of congruence is a never-ceasing fascination, the smells and morning newspapers and little superstitions that bridged their early lives, every similarity more meaningful than she knows it ought to be.”

Destiny Meaning Superstition

Book:Salt Slow

Source: Salt Slow

“It's hard when you look up and realise that everyone's moved off and left you in that place by yourself. Like they've all gone on and you're there still, holding on to this person you're supposed to let go of.”

Grief

Book:Our Wives Under the Sea

Source: Our Wives Under the Sea

“I think about the way that we met, and then much later the way I assumed she was dead, after five months of radio silence—about how all you want to do in response to grief is talk about it but all everyone assumes you want to do is talk about anything else.”

Grief

Book:Our Wives Under the Sea

Source: Our Wives Under the Sea

“Grief is selfish: we cry for ourselves without the person we have lost far more than we cry for the person.”

Grief

Book:Our Wives Under the Sea

Source: Our Wives Under the Sea

“Something I learned very quickly was that grieving was complicated by lack of certainty, that the hope inherent in a missing loved one was also a species of curse. People posted about children who had gone missing upwards of fifteen years ago and whose faces were now impossible to conjure, about friends who had messaged to confirm a meeting place and then simply never showed up. In almost every case, the sense of loss was convoluted by an ache of possibility, by the almost-but-not-quite-negligible hope of reprieve. Deus ex machina – the missing loved one thrown back down to earth. 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.”

Death Loss Grief Mourning Dead Disappearance

Book:Our Wives Under the Sea

Source: Our Wives Under the Sea

“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.”

Love Lgbtq Haunting Linguistics

Book:Salt Slow

Source: Salt Slow

“I found myself wishing she'd come back as a vampire or a werewolf, something with fangs and a destructive will. As it was, the onus seemed to be on me to make something of the visit.”

Ghost Haunting Apparitions Poltergeist

Book:Salt Slow

Source: Salt Slow

“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.”

Life Feminism Inspirarional

Book:Our Wives Under the Sea

Source: Our Wives Under the Sea

“I explained to her the way I felt I floated up out of myself and observed the whole thing loosely, from a distance. I explained the way i felt no better or worse after doing it, only an overwhelming sense of having missed the point.”

Sex Asexuality Ace

Book:Salt Slow

Source: Salt Slow

“Faded patches where the paintings used to hang – a common phenomenon for which Nicola was once startled to realise there is no formal name – disfigure every room in the house.”

Language Nameless Things

Book:Salt Slow

Source: Salt Slow

“El océano profundo es una casa embrujada: un lugar donde se mueven en la oscuridad cosas que no deberían existir.”

Océano Casa Embrujada

Book:Our Wives Under the Sea

Source: Our Wives Under the Sea

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

Sleep Self Contempt

Book:Salt Slow

Source: Salt Slow

“[...] the smeared place where recollection should have been. It is a curious thing, a sensation not unlike surfacing from sleep and grasping vainly for a fast-receding thought. It is as if she'll watch the show and then her mind will close around it, knuckle-clench the way a magician palms a coin, opens up with an empty hand.”

Dream Sleep Magic Memory

Book:Salt Slow

Source: Salt Slow

Julia Armfield Books

Salt Slow

Our Wives Under the Sea

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