Private Rites Quotes

“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, Private Rites

“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, Private Rites

“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, Private Rites

“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, Private Rites

“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, Private Rites

“The first time you lose a parent, a part of you gets trapped there; trapped less in the moment of grief than in the knowledge of the end of childhood, the inevitable dwindling of the days.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“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, Private Rites

“The sensation, then, not so much of being misunderstood as being understood too well at one time and then never again.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“ At what point, she wanted to say, do we stop being the direct product of our parents? At what point does it start being our fault?”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“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, Private Rites

“What comes next will be trickier, of course. Snowfall and a drop in temperature, a world tilting, the suddenness of something new. Best to keep on, wherever this is possible. Best, in time, to swim back from a drowning place and continue, struggle back into dailiness, and to live with the icing-over of windows, the frozen pipes and bad wiring and increasing impossibility. Better, in whatever small way, to go on until it becomes too cold to do so. Better to hold one’s hands to whatever warmth there is, to kiss and talk and grieve and fuck and hold tight against the whitening of the sky.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“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, Private Rites

“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, Private Rites

“Phones are how people reach you, and nothing very good can come from that.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“A house, unlatched, is less a house and more a set of rooms through which one might be hunted.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“ Sometimes I think hope is a far less satisfying feeling than despair.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“ I basically think the one job you have as a parent is to give your kid a childhood they don’t have to recover from.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“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, Private Rites

“I’m a Scorpio, Irene said, which is weird because I think both of my sisters are Scorpios. Like my dad just wanted to make life as difficult as possible.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“She thinks, for a split second, about her mother and then stops before the thought can get up and walk around, start doing real damage.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“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, Private Rites

“everything related to the organisation of a funeral seems precision-tooled to make a person feel studded with tiny little pieces of glass.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“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, Private Rites

“People love a ritual when things get hairy, to feel they're doing something that thousands of people have done before them.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“Thinks about her father and then tries to elude it, imagines folding herself up so thin that the thought can't find her and has no choice but to glide right past.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“She is slumped at one end of the sofa and seems drunk in a way that doesn't suit her, like someone is impersonating her more or less accurately but with crucially fewer bones.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“She's good at her job, but the impulse to open her mouth and say something dreadful recurs and recurs. Not unlike the irrational desire to dash a contemplative silence to pieces or climb to some high place and jump, so it seems a compulsion born less of intent than of the simple fact of its own possibility. The fact that she could do it is more than enough. She reels it in, always. Reels herself in tight. Any minute now, she thinks, any second, I could crash this whole day into the wall.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“There is a horror movie adage that people are always running up the stairs when they should be jumping out of windows, but what is a person supposed to do when all obvious exits are underwater?”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“There is little the imagination can do with an ending that is already assured.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“Irena shakes her head; thinks, for an instant, of the first time she told Jude she loved them, the moment that marked the end of waiting, of hanging around wondering what the big event of her life might be.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites