Salt Slow Quotes

“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, Salt Slow

“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, Salt Slow

“She was a gentle sort of horror...”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

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

“The sky is gory with stars, like the insides of a gutted night”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“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, Salt Slow

“Occasionally, I convinced myself I had made it all up — love, attraction, all of it — that I had made it up with everyone I'd ever met.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“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, Salt Slow

“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, Salt Slow

“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, Salt Slow

“thats the problem with kissing. in theory, when someone's good at it, you should be able to keep kissing forever. but of course, forever is too long to do anything without getting bored.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“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, 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.”
― Julia Armfield, 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.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“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, Salt Slow

“Privately, however, she knew herself better. Knew herself for what she was: a great failure at solitude.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“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, Salt Slow

“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, Salt Slow

“From a purely physical perspective, it is hard to love a man without breaking him apart.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“After coffee and croissants, he presses her down into the mattress. In her tenderized, meat-colored room he holds her wrists together, bites her neck. Stone-weight of him, a reassuring breadth.”
― Julia Armfield, salt slow

“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.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“I pressed my face to her chest in the too-soft place where the skin was still intact and felt I understood the way the surface of the world is thinner in certain places. That these places are where the strange, true things escape.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“Ocasionally, I convinced myself I had made it all up - love, attraction, all of it - that I had made it up with everyone I'd ever met.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“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, Salt Slow

“It is easy enough, of course, to forget that she loves him. On the days between frenzies, when he leaves muddy footprints on the kitchen lino, when he whistles through his teeth. No one, she is sure, is capable of loving all the time, without interruptions or reprieves.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“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.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“There is a level of insult I cannot overlook,’ Miriam announced, ‘in the way that men behave towards women.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“The night is wide, uncurving, like the earth might be flat and walkable from end to distant end.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“She was tired of tiredness, she told me. She was tired of feeling left out.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“Mornings have been the hardest things to adapt to; company after three decades of waking up alone. She has always considered herself the kind of person seen to best effect at four p.m., once the day has burnt away and softened up her difficulties. Having someone with her from the outset gives her no rehearsal space, no time to sink down into some more pliable version of the creature she is to begin with.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow