It Chooses You Quotes

“All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“It was an act of devotion. A little like writing or loving someone — it doesn’t always feel worthwhile, but not giving up somehow creates unexpected meaning over time.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“It occurred to me that everyone’s story matters to themselves, so the more I listened, the more she wanted to talk.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“Most of life is offline, and I think it always will be; eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body. But it's not impossible to imagine losing my appetite for those things; they aren't always easy, and they take so much time. In twenty years I'd be interviewing air and water and heat just to remember they mattered.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“The funny thing about my procrastination was that I was almost done with the screenplay. I was like a person who had fought dragons and lost limbs and crawled through swamps and now, finally, the castle was visible. I could see tiny children waving flags on the balcony; all I had to do was walk across a field to get to them. But all of a sudden I was very, very sleepy. And the children couldn't believe their eyes as I folded down to my knees and fell to the ground face-first, with my eyes open. Motionless, I watched ants hurry in and out of a hole and I knew that standing up again would be a thousand times harder than the dragon or the swamp and so I did not even try. I just clicked on one thing after another after another.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“I nodded, pretending I was relaxed. I watched the sunlight sparkling on the water and practiced mind-body integration for a few seconds by quietly hyperventilating.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“In my paranoid world every storekeeper thinks I’m stealing, every man thinks I’m a prostitute or a lesbian, every woman thinks I’m a lesbian or arrogant, and every child and animal sees the real me and it is evil.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“He's stuck at 3:14 a.m. with only the moon to talk to.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“I supposed this was one reason why people got married, to make a fiction that was tellable. It wasn’t just movies that couldn’t contain the full cast of characters — it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew where to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing. But together or alone, we were still embedded in a kaleidoscope, ruthlessly varied and continuous, until the end of the end.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life - where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“I knew the beginning and the end – I just had to dream up a convincing middle.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“… it wasn’t pretend, I wasn’t in a fairytale or a fable. I shut my eyes and absorbed the silent whoomp that always accompanies this revelation. It’s the sound of the real world, gigantic and impossible, replacing the smaller version of reality that I wear like a bonnet, clutched tightly under my chin.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“The word God asks a question and then answers it before there is any chance to wonder.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“As if I feared that the scope of what I could feel and imagine was being quietly limited by the world within a world, the internet. The things outside of the web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant. The blogs of strangers had to be read daily, and people nearby who had no web presence were becoming almost cartoonlike, as if they were missing a dimension.

It was just happening, like time, like geography. The web seemed so inherently endless that it didn't occur to me what wasn't there. My appetite for pictures and videos and news and music was so gigantic now that if something was shrinking, something immesurable, how would I notice?

...Most of life is offline, and I think it always will be; eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body. But it's not impossible to imagine loosing my appetite for those things; they aren't always easy, and they take so much time.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“After passionately nursing this idea for about an hour, I suddenly had another idea: no I wouldn't. Of course I wouldn't make an entire city out of cereal boxes in the basement. The moment I had this second thought, I knew this was the real one.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“LA isn’t a walking city, or a subway city, so if someone isn’t in my house or my car we’ll never be together, not even for a moment. And just to be absolutely sure of that, when I leave my car my iPhone escorts me, letting everyone else in the post office know that I’m not really with them, I’m with my own people, who are so hilarious that I can’t help smiling to myself as I text them back.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“It wasn’t just movies that couldn’t contain the full cast of characters — it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew where to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing. But together or alone, we were still embedded in a kaleidoscope, ruthlessly varied and continuous, until the end of the end. I knew I would forget this within the hour, and then remember, and forget, and remember. Each time I remembered it would be a tiny miracle, and forgetting was just as important — I had to believe in my own story.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“When I leave my car my iPhone escorts me, letting everyone else in the post office know that I’m not really with them, I’m with my own people, who are so hilarious that I can’t help smiling to myself as I text them back.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“I felt like I wasn’t living thoroughly enough — I was distracted in ways I wouldn’t be if I’d been born in 1929.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body. But it’s not impossible to imagine losing my appetite for those things; they aren’t always easy, and they take so much time.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You