quotes by Miranda July

"What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real. "
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can't see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees.

Ten True Things"
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. There are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is how life is. In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy for dreaming of something else."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"But, like ivy, we grow where there is room for us."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"People tend to stick to their own size group because it's easier on the neck. Unless they are romantically involved, in which case the size difference is sexy. It means: I am willing to go the distance for you.

The Shared Patio"
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"Inelegantly, and without my consent, time passed."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"That day I carried the dream around like a full glass of water, moving gracefully so I would not lose any of it."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn't allow you to be who you are, over the course of a lifetime, is still one of the most chilling nightmares to me. It's a good metaphor for fears I have about losing my soul in some accidental, mundane way. So, to me, these jobs that my characters have are very loaded. They immediately suggest a complex character to me, a woman who is, say, a secretary, but also a vigilante on behalf of her own soul."
— Miranda July

"If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his. You would die getting to him."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"Live the dream, Potato."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You)

"Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is really worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.
"
— Miranda July

"Some may say that such a girl is not ready for a relationship with a man, especially a man in his late sixties. But to that I say: We don't know anything. We don't know how to cure a cold or what dogs are thinking. We do terrible things, we make wars, we kill people out of greed. So who are we to say how to love. I wouldn't force her. I wouldn't have to. She would want me. We would be in love. What do you know. You don't know anything. Call me when you've cured AIDS, give me a ring then and I'll listen."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"He seemed to be waiting for me to move forward. Weren't we all."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"We were excited about getting jobs; we hardly went anywhere without filling out an application. But once we were hired - as furniture sanders - we could not believe this was really what people did all day. Everything we had thought of as The World was actually the result of someone's job. Each line on the sidewalk, each saltine. Everyone had a rotting carpet and a door to pay for. Aghast, we quit. There had to be a more dignified way to live. We needed time to consider ourselves, to come up with a theory about who we were and set it to music.

Something That Needs Nothing"
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"I looked at other couples and wondered how they could be so calm about it. They held hands as if they weren't even holding hands. When Steve and I held hands, I had to keep looking down to marvel at it. There was my hand, the same hand I've always had - oh, but look! What is it holding? It's holding Steve's hand! Who is Steve? My three-dimensional boyfriend. Each day I wondered what would happen next. What happens when you stop wanting, when you are happy. I supposed I would go on being happy forever. I knew I would not mess things up by growing bored. I had done that once before."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"People are always breaking through, like in the Doors song 'Break on Through (To the Other Side)'. But I really had. I had broken through twice now, and my feeling about the universe was that it was porous and radical and you could turn it on, you could even fuck around with the universe."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"You always feel like you are the only one in the world, like everyone else is crazy for each other, but it's not true. Generally, people don't like each other very much. And that goes for friends, too. "
— Miranda July

"They wordlessly excused each other for not loving each other as much as they had planned to. There were empty rooms in the house where they had meant to put their love, and they worked together to fill these rooms with midcentury modern furniture. ("Birthmark")."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"I really did not feel okay about any of this, and there was really nothing I could do about any of it.

How to Tell Stories to Children
p199 "
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"Inelegantly and without my consent, time passed.

How to Tell Stories to Children
p198 "
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"There was nothing in this world that was not a con, suddenly I understood this. Nothing really mattered, and nothing could be lost. "
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"This person realizes that staying home means blowing off everyone this person has ever known. But the desire to stay in is very strong. This person wants to run a bath and then read in bed."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"It was a real whale, a photograph of a real whale. I looked into its tiny wise eye and wondered where that eye was now. Was it alive and swimming, or had it died long ago, or was it dying now, right this second? When a whale dies, it falls down through the ocean slowly, over the course of a day. All the other fish see it fall, like a giant statue, like a building, but slowly, slowly."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"Sometimes I would make left turns all the way around a block, and when I returned to the original intersection, I would feel disappointed to find all the drivers were new. It wasn't like a square dance, where you miraculously end up with your original partner, laughing and feeling giddily relieved to find him after dancing with everyone else in the world. Instead, they swung around and kept on going, some people were at work by now, or halfway to the airport. In fact, driving might be the thing most opposite of dancing."
— Miranda July

"I made orange juice from concentrate and showed her the trick of squeezing the juice of one real orange into it. It removes the taste of being frozen. She marveled at this, and I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again."
— Miranda July

"I looked out the window for other passengers in love with their drivers, but we were well disguised, we pretended boredom and prayed for traffic."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"In the weeks that followed, we amazed ourselves. Our habits slid apart easily...And our very few intimacies were simply discontinued. Where did they go, those things we did? Were they recycled? Did some new couple in China do them? Were a Swedish man and woman foot to foot at this very moment? "
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"I went to the bedroom and lay on the floor, so as not to mess up the covers."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"Would she understand that time had stopped while she was gone."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"... we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"But, like ivy, we grow where there is room for us. "
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"I asked myself if I would kill my parents to save his life, a question I had been posing since I was fifteen. The answer always used to be yes. But in time, all those boys had faded away, and my parents were still there. I was now less and less willing to kill them for anyone; in fact, I worried for their health. In this case, however, I had to say yes. Yes, I would."
— Miranda July

"I walked down the hall and saw that [she] was sitting on the floor next to a chair. This is always a bad sign. It's a slippery slope, and it's best just to sit in chairs, to eat when hungry, to sleep and rise and work. But we have all been there. Chairs are for people, and you're not sure if you are one."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"Leave the dream, Potato"
— Miranda July (Learning to Love You More)