Quotation Study: Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield
On a long title...
This is not necessarily a review—I just love analysing and unpacking quotes, sometimes even individual words within them. However, as a general rule, if I underline lots of quotes, it’s usually a highly rated book!
These are studies of quotes within certain novels—either unpacking larger themes or simply exploring how each quote makes me feel on its own. I like applying quotes to my life, using them to articulate feelings I’ve never known how to describe. So, welcome to Quotation Studies.
There’s no rhyme or reason here. Just thoughts sprawled out onto a page. It’s me enjoying language as a former literature student who misses the act of unpacking words.
This Week: Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield.
I’ve already done a quotation study on Private Rites, but as I’ve mentioned before, Armfield has become a favourite of mine. Her novels have this uncanny ability to leave you feeling haunted—like something has shifted in the atmosphere around you, even after you’ve turned the last page. Our Wives Under the Sea was no exception. There’s just something deeply unsettling about the ocean, don’t you think?
The title might seem random at first, but once you’ve made your way through the novel, it clicks into place. I love when a book does that—not with some clumsy, grand reveal where a character awkwardly declares the title in a dramatic monologue, but when the words naturally build toward it, like the title was always there, waiting. It’s the final touch, the ribbon on a gift you didn’t realize you were unwrapping.
At its core, this novel is about the great and terrifying depths of the ocean—both literal and emotional. And there are some absolutely haunting quotes on the uncertainty of the sea that I haven’t been able to shake.
"Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began."
The sea is a cannibal. It swallows everything that can’t survive its currents, an endless, indifferent force that doesn’t care who or what gets caught in it. It’s ancient down there. There’s no modern hierarchy—just survival of the fittest. Swim or get eaten.
"The ocean is different, the ocean covers its tracks."
The ocean is in a constant state of flux. Heraclitus said, ‘You can never step into the same river twice’—the same is true for the sea. It’s secretive, deceptive. One minute the waters are still, the next they’ve turned against you.
"The city is veined with inland tributaries and close dispersed canals, water-logged about its edges. Bridged across its belly, a river running down its throat."
This line is both beautiful and deeply unsettling. Water is everywhere. It moves around us, beneath us, above us. We like to think we’ve tamed it, but really, we’re just living around its edges, trying not to be swallowed whole.
"Panic is a misuse of oxygen."
I never thought about panic in those terms before, but it’s a strangely helpful reminder. A wasted breath. Something to hold onto in a moment of spiraling.
"Sometimes, I imagine the things I want to say to her, but increasingly I find myself capable of producing little but a kind of mental white noise."
Alongside the terror of the deep, the novel also captures the quieter, more everyday anxieties that feel just as suffocating. I feel this one so much—my mind brimming with things I want to say, but when the moment comes, the words just dissolve. And I sit there, silent. It holds me back more than I’d like to admit.
"Things continue. This is something I have always found: unfortunately, things go on."
This one hit like a punch to the stomach. It’s tragically, relentlessly true. The world doesn’t pause for grief, for heartbreak, for the moments that break us open. I lost my grandad a few years ago, and while my heart shattered and my favorite person was gone, I still had to go to uni, to work, to keep moving. You want everything to stop for just a moment—to acknowledge the loss—but it never does.
"Like everyone, most of Carmen’s higher education seems to have leaked out of her around her mid to late twenties, replaced in the main by methods of treating black mould, by passwords or roast chicken recipes and the symptoms of cervical cancer."
I got an MA in English Literature, and now I spend my days scrubbing mould from my damp flat and, quite literally, Googling symptoms of cervical cancer at work. This quote is painfully accurate. But at least I’m putting my degree to use here, right?
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