Miranda July citations

Page 2

“Ce n’est pas de votre faute.”

“When you can see the beauty of a tree, then you will know what love is.”

“She never inquired, but she never recoiled, either. This is a quality that I look for in a person, not recoiling.”

“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?”

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

“For a split second I felt as though she was nobody special in the larger scheme of my life. She was just some girl who had tied me to her leg to help her sink when she jumped off the bridge. Then I blinked and was in love with her again.”

“Live the dream, Potato.”

“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.”

“Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy to hope for something else.”

“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.”

“Then I realized that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.”

“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.”

“I could not make a move without making love.”

“We come from long lines of people destined never to meet.”

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

“Would she understand that time had stopped while she was gone.”

“Sometimes I looked at her sleeping face, the living flesh of it, and was overwhelmed by how precarious it was to love a living thing. She could die simply from lack of water. It hardly seemed safer than falling in love with a plant.”

“I went to the bedroom and lay on the floor, so as not to mess up the covers.”

“It wasn't good, he wasn't good, he did not have good intentions. I stood there, and he stood there. He breathed out the bitter air that makes women doubt everything, and I breathed it in, as I had always done.”

“In an ideal world, we would have been orphans. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents.”

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

“We really wanted to know all the unknowable things about each other and how we were the same and how we were different, if we even were, maybe nobody is.”

“I steeled myself against laughter; I would rather die than laugh. I didn’t laugh, I did not laugh. But I died, I did die.”

“… we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.”

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

“We were always getting away with something, which implied that someone was always watching us, which mean were are not alone in this world.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I was going to die and it was taking forever.”