No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories

by Miranda July

book data

6,279 ratings, 3.73 average rating, 1,624 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		25%
4		36%
3		26%
2		8%
1		2%

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published

May 15th 2007 by Scribner

binding

Hardcover, 224 pages

literary awards

2007 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award

isbn

0743299396 (isbn13: 9780743299398)

description

Award-winning filmmaker and performing artist Miranda July brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a startling, sexy, and tender collection. I...more

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05/18/07

Anne rated it:

Read in June, 2007

recommends it for: birthmarked women. stylish prosers. magazines who might publish my fiction.

Note: If I could fashion a little half-star and put it in the rating, I would give this book at 3.5.

Miranda July: she's the lightning-rod hipster conversation of the year. I say her name at dinners and people rise from their chairs to damn or bless her. They pace and sweat and expound upon why she is the worst/best thing to happen to fiction in eons. They yell: "She's the next Lorrie Moore!" or "She's like those people who try to imitate Lorrie Moore and miss wha...more Note: If I could fashion a little half-star and put it in the rating, I would give this book at 3.5.

Miranda July: she's the lightning-rod hipster conversation of the year. I say her name at dinners and people rise from their chairs to damn or bless her. They pace and sweat and expound upon why she is the worst/best thing to happen to fiction in eons. They yell: "She's the next Lorrie Moore!" or "She's like those people who try to imitate Lorrie Moore and miss what's really good about her!" Sometimes they've actually read one of her stories or seen her movie, but sometimes they just resent her fame or adore her blog. In the bookstore, the yellow or pink jacketed hardcover book of short stories (yes, I said hardcover) beams from the bookshelf. It says, "I have no cover design. I need no cover design. And yes, my author photo went shopping at Anthropologie, then shunned all human contact (or staged this elaborate ruse)." I bought the yellow book. I was simultaneously suspicious and curious. And I STILL AM, despite having finished it. Here's the thing: Miranda July is an immensely talented writer. I want to make out with her imagination. Some of the stories ("Something That Needs Nothing," "Birthmark," "Mon Plaisir") in this collection are fabulously weird and lovely and offbeat -- and they take you to surprising emotional places. Others, however, feel a bit overwritten and unfinished. I admire her authority, but sometimes it comes across as vanity, and I get squirmy when I think an author relishes her own prose or ideas too much (takes one to know one). The things that leave me cold in July's work are the very things I worry about in my own, so this is a very personal critique. Lately, when magazines turn down my fiction, they praise my prose and voice and characters -- but they don't buy the endings or feel there is enough closure, etc., etc., so I want to know how she can fool them all and I can't? The truth is, I *loved* some of these stories. The last in the book -- "How to Tell Stories to Children" -- I would even give five stars to. But I feel let down by selections like "Making Love in 2003" and "The Boy from Lam Kien," which read like a bunch of "good line - no home" fragments pieced together. And stories like "The Shared Patio" and "The Swim Team" (the latter of which people go all kinds of crazy for) feel unsatisfyingly incomplete -- they set something up but don't go places with it. Nothing shifts. Saying this makes me feel conventional, but when I read, I want to feel *something* or be supremely aware of its absence. In these stories, July swears it's there, but it's not always. Also, I'm tiring of madwomen -- in her fiction, in my fiction, in everyone's fiction. OK, fine, I love them, but I also wonder what we're not dealing with or what kind of shortcut this is or if we think only nutjobs speak-think magical prose. "Ten True Things" and "Something That Needs Nothing" reminded me so much of my own stories (thematically and prose-ishly) that it was almost hard to read them. I felt like she was showing me everything that's glorious and horrible in my own work...everything was magnified. [Apologies to anyone who has read this far for all presumptuous, conceited, self-centered, self-analytical, self-serving comparisons above. I seek unprofessional help from anyone who wants to comment.](less)

Like this review? yes (22 people liked it)

6 comments

09/05/07

Jeff rated it:

Read in August, 2007

recommends it for: people who are walking around a bookstore

I bought this book cause I was walking through a bookstore with a friend of mine... a friend I adore more than newborn puppies and tiny rabbits hopping in fields of grass, and she said, "MIRANDA JULY! I love her. She made the movie You, Me, and Everyone We Know."
I hadn't seen the movie, but I remember seeing an ad in the paper and thinking, "I want to see that movie."
And it was because of that, and because I adore this girl more than newborn puppies, and rabbit...more I bought this book cause I was walking through a bookstore with a friend of mine... a friend I adore more than newborn puppies and tiny rabbits hopping in fields of grass, and she said, "MIRANDA JULY! I love her. She made the movie You, Me, and Everyone We Know."
I hadn't seen the movie, but I remember seeing an ad in the paper and thinking, "I want to see that movie."
And it was because of that, and because I adore this girl more than newborn puppies, and rabbits hopping in fields of grass, and moonlit nights, and sundrenched mornings, that I bought two copies of the book (one for her, and one for me. One could say "Jeff: Nice boy." One has said, "Jeff: Helpless romanitc sucker." I loath both definitions.

A book of short stories. Most are delicate. Like something you'd find in your grandmother's junk drawer. Not the one in her kitchen. The one that's the top drawer of her dresser. The one that's filled with pearl buttons, and half knitted doilies, and old black and white photos with a younger version of your grandmother, and complete strangers. You wonder who those people were? What kind of double life did your grandmother lead? Are these people still alive? Does she keep in contact with them? It's a whole world of possibility. You start to see your grandmother in a wholey different light. She's no longer this older woman who is constantly trying to feed or, or berating you for not wearing shoes or not having a job befitting of a college graduate. She's a real person now, with half knitted doilies, and pictures of random people. Old patches that look as if they were ripped off a G.I. uniform.
It would break your heart if you asked, and your Grandmother said, "Oh, look at that. You found that in my drawer? No, I have no idea what that is."
So you just let your imagination run wild.

Some stories fall flat. Like opening your grandmother's junk drawer and finding nail clippers. But at least they're sharp nail clippers... not the kind that break your nails when you try to use them. And sometimes, that's enough to get you through the day.(less)

Like this review? yes (19 people liked it)

1 comment

06/22/08

Alison rated it:

recommends it for: Ugh, I don't know.

For me, this book was two stories away from being downright terrible. One story, "Mon Plaisir," I thought was excellent. Another I found myself enjoying quite a bit. Others contained passages that made me grimace. Physically. Like, I wanted to turn my head away. Instead, I just dog-eared the pages that contained the shitty passages:

"My knees buckled, I went down to the floor. I cried in English, I cried in French, I cried in all the languages, because tears ar...more

Like this review? yes (15 people liked it)

4 comments

07/18/07

Siobhan rated it:

Read in July, 2007

recommends it for: sorry, nobody...

I hate to say this, but I really did not enjoy the experience of reading past the first two stories or so. After a while I just couldn't figure out the appeal of a book that is packed cover to cover with disingenuous, childlike, wide-eyed, self-destructive women who are really just ciphers that things happen to... Okay, I take that back, of course that’s appealing to people, have I never watched porn or "Charmed"? But all the narrators would say things like, “After my boyfriend was...more

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06/18/07

Avishay Artsy rated it:

Read in September, 2007

Missed Connection
Author exorcises demons as characters search for love
by Avishay Artsy

Everybody gets lonely sometimes, and Miranda July crams as many forms of loneliness she can think of in her first collection of stories.

The inhabitants of July’s imagination reach out to strangers in hopes of genuine connection. Unable to find it, they often use sex to simulate closeness. A teacher seduces a 14-year-old boy in her special-needs class, and no one notices be...more Missed Connection
Author exorcises demons as characters search for love
by Avishay Artsy

Everybody gets lonely sometimes, and Miranda July crams as many forms of loneliness she can think of in her first collection of stories.

The inhabitants of July’s imagination reach out to strangers in hopes of genuine connection. Unable to find it, they often use sex to simulate closeness. A teacher seduces a 14-year-old boy in her special-needs class, and no one notices because “nobody really cares about anyone but themselves anyway.” An old man dreams of bedding a teenage girl, only to result in his first gay encounter with a co-worker. A woman climaxes while listening over the phone to her sister catalog her nightly sexual conquests. Two women at a romance seminar hold each other and weep passionately, then break apart, embarrassed.

July has been toying with the concept of disaffection for over a decade. Her early spoken word/music collages were released on the Kill Rock Stars label. In 2005, she starred in her breakout indie feature film “Me and You and Everyone We Know” as herself, a young performance artist eager to break into the art establishment. Likewise, her stories are narrated in the first person, an acknowledgement of the inseparability of her creations from herself.

July is among the finest of a growing pool of younger writers looking to chronicle the nation’s ennui. But her characters seem mostly oblivious to the problems outside their windows. The occasional references to popular culture, such as a television show where “couples compete at remodeling their kitchens,” are dismissive, treating the outside world as grotesque and senseless.

Despite the bleakness of their lonely lives, the adults in the stories respond to their surroundings with child-like puzzlement and wonder. One woman teaches the elderly inhabitants of her small town to swim by having them crawl across her apartment floor, their faces submerged in bowls of water. Another witnesses a neighbor having a seizure, and rather than rush for help, lays her head on his shoulder and takes a nap. Then, when she is awoken and sent to retrieve his medicine, a photograph of a whale on the refrigerator door sends her into a reverie. The woman, an amateur advice columnist, suggests depressed readers share their sorrows with a telephone operator or postman.

If there’s a shortcoming here, it’s that the empathy the reader feels for the characters soon gives way to annoyance at their remorseless narcissism. They all seem like thinly-veiled sketches of the author, wondering what it means to really love. It seems trendy to complain that, with so many new gadgets and digital landscapes designed to improve communication, no one knows how to speak to each other anymore. But July’s characters don’t just want to talk, they want to belong. And in their search for connection, they somehow manage to scratch out a place of their own.

No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories by Miranda July (Scribner: 2007), 205 pages.(less)

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01/03/08

Your Pal rated it:

No One Belongs in an Undergrad Creative Writing Class More Than Miranda July.
Imaginatively and intellectually lazy. These stories - like Me and You and Everyone We Know - showcase bursts of philosophy that go nowhere. There are brief glimpses of hilarity and depth, but that's it. Often, the starting point for a story will be exciting - then it will get pulled through the insubstantial-yet-"cool"-"pop"-"retro" Play-Dough Fun Factory and just look like spaghet...more

Like this review? yes (9 people liked it)

3 comments

07/07/07

oriana rated it:

bookshelves: read-2007, the-new-new-new-new-thing

Everybody is talking about this chick. I'm interested to see if she deserves the hype.

***************************************************************

And she does! First let me mention: I had heard all this talk of her being the latest hipster literary darling, but when I went to the Strand for a proof copy (I hate hardcovers), all my old co-worker friends kinda shamed me, saying that she was favored mostly by the chick-lit set. Strange, and I definitely can't imagine her ...more

Like this review? yes (8 people liked it)

17 comments

08/28/07

Ben rated it:

bookshelves: books-i-gave-up-on

Miranda July's radio pieces are excellent. She tells her off-beat and romantic or oddly sinister stories, dramatizes quirks as real characters and situations, and enchants you with her squeaky little voice. Nothing makes sense, but nothing *has* to make sense. You just have to listen and be carried away.

I thought her movie was pretty good too, although right on the edge of being twee and pretentious. You see, when you take a picture of something you give it weight. You're saying: t...more

Like this review? yes (5 people liked it)

3 comments

07/26/07

Caroline rated it:

Read in May, 2007

On the first really hot day of summer '07 in New York, I lied down to read Miranda July's "No One Belongs Here More Than You." The collection of short stories reads very quickly; after two hours alone in my room I had read through more than half.

Miranda July's storys are punctuated with the lost and the lonely and the slightly perverse. A father who teaches his taughter how to pleasure women with his special finger tricks, a girl who teaches the ederly in a desert communi...more

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03/29/08

Steven rated it:

bookshelves: short-stories

Read in June, 2008

One of the worst collections I've ever finished. I bought this one in hardcover when it first came out and was excited to read it because it had great buzz and won the Frank O'Connor prize. Sadly, I struggled through every story. Perhaps I will enjoy this more on some future reread; and I'm even willing to concede that I might be tone-deaf to this author at this time, but I suspect she was given a free pass on her fiction because of her success as a filmmaker. The cover blurbs trumpet her origin...more

Like this review? yes (4 people liked it)

2 comments

08/06/07

Afshi rated it:

bookshelves: enjoyed

I didn't love it the way I thought I would. A lot of the stories are similar, and are almost all in first person. Which is fine, but after a while, with short stories, it begins to feel like there is only one character and it can get boring. It's difficult to establish who many of the story tellers are, and July introduces bits of information about them almost as an afterthought; as if she knows they all sound like the same person and she needs to fix it. When she suddenly has a character descri...more

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01/24/08

Jonathan rated it:

Read in January, 2008

“Not everyone has to be literate, there are some great reasons for resisting language, and one of them is love.”

So goes the lilting logic in Miranda July's self-fashioned world of wonder and regret and pain and hilarity. One wishes continually when flipping through this book that he could be part of her microcosm. Playing observer to the tragicomic plights of her characters is damn good fun, though.

The wrenching-yet-light "The Shared Patio" leads off, suffic...more “Not everyone has to be literate, there are some great reasons for resisting language, and one of them is love.”

So goes the lilting logic in Miranda July's self-fashioned world of wonder and regret and pain and hilarity. One wishes continually when flipping through this book that he could be part of her microcosm. Playing observer to the tragicomic plights of her characters is damn good fun, though.

The wrenching-yet-light "The Shared Patio" leads off, sufficiently whelming from the start. July renders the fine line between utter sadness and true joy to a blur. It's the bearable lightness of being that gets her characters through, and that maybe gets her through too. One can see how these short stories are a form of self-therapy for the scribe.

And what a whimsical pen it is that she wields:

“That is my problem with life, I rush through it, like I’m being chased. Even things whose whole point is slowness, like drinking relaxing tea. When I drink relaxing tea, I suck it down as if I’m in a contest for who can drink relaxing tea the quickest. Or if I’m in a hot tub with some other people and we’re all looking up at the stars, I’ll be the first to say, It’s so beautiful here. The sooner you say, It’s so beautiful here, the quicker you can say, Wow, I’m getting overheated.”

I am hardly doing her justice. Even so, a recap of a few of the tall, lean tales she weaves: "The Man on the Stairs" is actually spellbinding stuff in the vein of Roald Dahl or Edgar Allen Poe (no, really). "The Sister" is chuckle-inducing before and after it is immensely sad. "Making Love in 2003" is perhaps the most taut of the longer stories, and July hilariously introduces the children's fantasy writer Madeleine L'Engle as one of her characters (it's not really her, and L'Engle herself actually just left our swiftly tilting planet in 2007).

The people populating these stories are flawed and fabulous. You want to know them all, even the disagreeable ones. Through the sharp eyes and tart tongues of her creations, July relays her thoughts on love, romance, pain, and more. Her takes on friendship are most real and convincing of a lot of real and convincing statements. She simply adds a real lightness to the weight of being human. We could all learn from that.

“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.”(less)

Like this review? yes (3 people liked it)

3 comments

01/16/08

Chai rated it:

bookshelves: i-own, short-stories

Read in December, 2008

I was torn between wanting to punch her writing in the throat, and loving it to shreds. I've changed my rating a million times and probably forever will. It's hard to rate a book of short stories like this one, some of them were a straight out 1, others were a 5. Sometimes I feel July is pretentious, other times I get excited that I'm not the only person in the world that is so god damned weird. Her thought processes go in places that mine do. I was the kind of kid who failed school -not because...more

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06/22/07

Jason Pettus rated it:

Read in December, 2007

(My full review of this book is longer than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

I don't think it's any secret by now that I'm not a big fan of short stories, and even less so of bound story collections released as full-length books. I mean, I don't dislike short stories per se, just that I don't particularly go out of my way to read them either, and in general find most to be there and then g...more (My full review of this book is longer than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

I don't think it's any secret by now that I'm not a big fan of short stories, and even less so of bound story collections released as full-length books. I mean, I don't dislike short stories per se, just that I don't particularly go out of my way to read them either, and in general find most to be there and then gone again before I've ever really gotten a chance to sink my teeth into them, a frustrating thing for someone like me who really likes to do a deep, analytical reading of all the projects I consume in my life. But I also acknowledge that this is merely my personal biases shining through, and that there are in fact lots of things to admire about the short-fiction format as well, and lots of reasons to like stories precisely because they aren't full-length novels. For example, it's undeniable that in Western culture at least, short stories are one of the only narrative formats where one is allowed to ditch the traditional three-act structure (the framework behind most Western fictional projects since the times of the ancient Greeks), one of the only places where artists are allowed to be truly experimental without automatically having their work tossed into the "artsy mess" ghetto that so many of the general populace refuses to enter. It's a thing I've been thinking more and more about this year, in fact, of where the balance should lay in a person's life between longer traditional stories and shorter experimental ones; that while it's true that a well-rounded person should have a little of both as part of their intellectual diet, it's also true that most of us by human nature are going to vastly prefer one format over the other.

Take as a good example the first story collection I've now read for review here at CCLaP, the engaging and sometimes deeply disturbing No one belongs here more than you., the first traditional book by non-traditional artist Miranda July; it is in fact a perfect example of what I'm talking about, with the stories on display being both greater as a whole than any traditional novel and so much less as a sum of its parts, an experience that feels like being on a moped on an urban street full of start-and-stop traffic. Although ultimately a worthwhile publication, full of stories that I think really stand out among the world of contemporary literature, the book is unfortunately a fitful read as well, with certain pieces that will yank your brain right out of the made-up world that July so carefully slipped you into during the previous story. That's frustrating to me, as someone who likes getting caught up in the fictional projects I take on; it's frustrating to lose oneself in one of July's deceptively intense stories on display, just to be yanked back into the real world with the subpar writing or plotting of the next.

So why take on this book in the first place? Well, because...(less)

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01/27/08

Ill rated it:

Read in February, 2008

I am a cynical, old curmudgeon. I don't like darlings, I have no use for them. Miranda July is nothing if not a darling. So it is with great dismay that I report that she is also a terrific writer. Her stories are almost deceptive in their simplicity. What seems like it should be easy and cute is instead stark and visceral. Granted, I haven't read the whole thing: I just sneak stories in on my smoke breaks and read everything she publishes in literary journals. But I read "Majesty" and...more

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12/17/08

Jesse rated it:

Read in December, 2008

okay i rarely give up on books and when i do i rarely give them ratings. this is because i hate when people have only read like the first 100 pgs of like "gravity's rainbow" or "infinite jest" and because they have taken all of the 2 hours it takes to read that they think it qualifies them to then pass judgement on the whole book which took me a good forty hours to read, and that i loved. but lets face it, miranda july is no pynchon or dfw. that said i'm not here to bash the ...more

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7 comments

03/05/08

Samia rated it:

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in March, 2008

First, I should say that I only read three and two halves of the stories in this book. (The two halves were aborted attempts at making it through the entire book). Although I haven't seen Juno, from what I've gathered from the constant clips and previews, I think these stories are probably the literary equivalent. Ultra-hip, ultra-clever, and, uh, a little vapid. Might work for a movie, but not a collection of short stories.

Miranda July's performance art and film is amazing, and I...more

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09/13/07

Barbara rated it:

bookshelves: fiction

recommends it for: self-important hipsters

After hearing so many good things about this book, I was disappointed to find that it was actually pretty awful. The characters- mostly women- are just so unbelievable. Unbelievable in the sense that they don't seem like real people that the rest of us know. Maybe it's just my background that I couldn't identify with these characters and thus get into the stories. I prefer a combination of good character development and plot usually. This had relatively no character development- they were weird,...more

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09/06/07

Aaron rated it:

Did you ever see the movie Me, You, and Everyone We Know?

I did. I loved it. It was, in fact, one of my picks for the Top Five Movies of 2005.

This book, a stunning collection of melancholy stories, is written by the woman who wrote, directed, and starred in that film. If you liked that movie, you'll love this book. If you like this book, you'll want to see the movie. If you've done neither, you should do both. She's an incredible writer and this collection is one of the ...more

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08/10/07

Carissa rated it:

bookshelves: finished

Read in August, 2007

recommends it for: readers who are overly attached to novels with linear narratives

"It doesn't really feel like driving when you don't know where you're going. There should be an option on the car for driving in place, like treading water. Or at least a light that shines between the brake lights that you can turn on to indicate that you have no destination. I felt like I was fooling the other drivers and I just wanted to come clean. But the more I drove, the more I felt like I had somewhere to go. I was making difficult left turns that no one would ever do unless they had...more "It doesn't really feel like driving when you don't know where you're going. There should be an option on the car for driving in place, like treading water. Or at least a light that shines between the brake lights that you can turn on to indicate that you have no destination. I felt like I was fooling the other drivers and I just wanted to come clean. But the more I drove, the more I felt like I had somewhere to go. I was making difficult left turns that no one would ever do unless they had to. 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. I wondered if I would spend the rest of my life inventing complicated ways to depress myself, now that I had finished my book and gone to meet the man who said I had promise a year ago but wasn't home today." -- Miranda July, "Making Love in 2003"

Yesterday I asked my boyfriend if I could read him a story or two from this collection of funny and tender stories from Miranda July.

He said, Who's Miranda July?
I said, Do you remember that movie we started watching last year but didn't finish? It was called Me and You and Everyone We Know?
He said, No. I don't remember that.
I said, The first scene in the movie showed a guy walking outside and pouring lighter fluid on his arm and then setting his arm on fire? Remember?
He shook his head. No. I don't remember that.
(I thought, How could you possibly forget that?)

I didn't end up reading any stories aloud to him. But if I had, I probably would have read "Making Love in 2003," which I granted a quote of inappropriate length above because it is charming and unbelievable and funny.

The book has tons of sex in it: an elderly factory worker having his first gay encounter, a stripper being seduced by her on-again, off-again girlfriend, a father living with his daughter as a lover. Despite this, the personality of the stories stays unthreatening, earnest and truly likable. The characters are handled with great generosity and goodwill. A story about a woman who dreams of flying to England and aggressively seducing Prince William simply comes across as sweetly human, honest and funny.

Fans of Serious, Heavy Fiction would probably struggle to appreciate this collection, but sandwiched between my current reading list of Ernest Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy, this book felt like a perfect grace note for summer.(less)

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quotes from this book

"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. <i>Something That Needs Nothing</i>" More quotes...