Miranda July Quotes

68 Sourced Quotes

What I like best is the kind of complicated messed up truth, you know … the one that's so imperfect that you know it's true.

Miranda July
And why had Deb's last boyfriend dumped her? I dumped him. Maybe you didn't French-kiss him enough. I promise you that wasn't it. Tell me how many times a day you kissed, and I'll say if it was enough. Four hundred. Not enough.

Miranda July
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
Common sense and the truth should feel authorless, writ by time itself. It is actually really hard to write something that will make a terminally ill person feel better. And Positive has rules, you can't just lift your guidance from the Bible or a book about Zen; they want original material. So far none of my submissions have gotten in, but I'm getting closer.

Miranda July
I knew the beginning and the end – I just had to dream up a convincing middle.

Miranda July
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
He breathed out the bitter air that makes women doubt everything, and I breathed it in, as I had always done. I expelled my dust, the powder of everything I had destroyed with doubt, and he pulled it into his lungs.

Miranda July
I pretended that I was pausing before telling him about the secret feeling of joy that I hide in my chest, waiting, waiting, waiting for someone to notice that I rise each morning seemingly with nothing to live for, but I do rise, and it is only because of this secret joy, God's love, in my chest. I looked down from the sky and into his eyes and I said, It wasn't your fault. I excused him for the cover and for everything else. For not yet being a New Man. We fell into silence then; he did not ask me any more questions. I was still happy to sit there beside him, but that is only because I have very, very low expectations of most people, and he had now become Most People.

Miranda July
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
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
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
I think there's something spiritual in a very day-today, mundane existence. It's impossible to articulate, and it's happening now, almost like a perverse secret.... That's always sort of fascinating to me.

Miranda July
If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?

Miranda July
It was a small thing, but it was a thing, and things have a way of either dying or growing, and it wasn't dying.

Miranda July
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.

Miranda July
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 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
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
I'm totally not kidding. … Life is too short. This is all too hard to do to actually be kidding about the whole thing.

Miranda July
I guess my favorite thing in the world is when I look at a piece of art, or read a story, or watch a movie where I walk away feeling like "Oh my god — I have to do something, I have to make something or talk to someone — things are not the same anymore" — and so I try to make work where you come away with that feeling. It's like, yeah, you're thinking about what you just saw, but even more than that — you feel able, you feel like, kind of propelled.

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
I wanted to make the movie feel like life feels to me — and life feels both sad and dark and confusing and more than hopeful — it feels like something totally incredible could happen at any moment and with no explanation.

Miranda July
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
He was worried she would not let him love her with the stain. He had already decided long ago, twenty or thirty minutes ago, that the stain was fine. He had only seen it for a moment, but he was already used to it. It was good. It somehow allowed them to have more.

Miranda July
It is terrible to have to ask for anything ever. We wish we were something that needed nothing, like paint. But even paint needs repainting.

Miranda July
It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.

Miranda July
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.

Miranda July
She bludgeoned me with a look of such limitless compassion that I immediately began to cry.

Miranda July
When she saw my messy desk, she said she was the same way, and there was no dust on the TV, and I was easy to love. People just need a little help because they are so used to not loving. It's like scoring the clay to make another piece of clay stick to it.

Miranda July
We don't really believe in mowing the lawn; we do it only to avoid unnecessary engagement with the neighbors.

Miranda July