Quotes from Miranda July

So this was what it was like not to be me.

I went home early to study my apartment before the class. I wanted to look at everything through her eyes. I do this before I bring someone new into my life; I try to get a sense of who I am so that I can make it easier for them to know me.

It must happen all the time, a fleeting passion overwhelms someone's true course and there's nothing to be done about it.

I'm not saying I asked for it, only that there are moments when we are sending signals not just to the boys in the room but to all of creation.

I could see it so clearly, the zygote- shiny and bulbous, filled with the electric memory of being two but now damned with the eternal loneliness of being just one. The sorrow that never goes away.

But as the sun rose I crested the mountain of my self-pity and remembered I was always going to die at the end of this life anyway. What did it really matter if I spent it like this...as opposed to some other way? ...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?

The singer was lifted up and illuminated with gratitude, not for any one thing, but for the whole of his life, even for the agony. Even in Latin you could tell he was thanking God for the agony in particular, for the way it allowed him to cleave so tightly to the world.

After a minute a willowy woman with a baby boy came out. The baby was swinging a crystal from a string. I checked to see if he and I had a special connection that was greater than his bond with his mother. We didn't.

He drank the cotton-candy milk from the day at the pier. The last batch was from the morning she left and this milk was full of plans I didn't know about. When he finished that bottle she was really gone, every last drop of her.

Finally, in a low whisper, he said, "I think I might be a terrible person." For a split second I believed him—I thought he was about to confess a crime, maybe a murder. 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. "No

I was patience defined, patience misspelled, patience sounded out slowly, letter by letter, with the t pronounced "shh.

Tom began screaming, and I wondered if the baby's soft brain was, in this moment, changing shape in response to the violent stimuli. I tried to intellectualize the noise to protect the baby's psyche. I whispered: Isn't that interesting to hear a man scream? Doesn't that challenge our stereotypes of what men can do? And then I tried, Shhhhhhhhh.

I feel into the eyes of every person I passed on the street.

For the first six months I just walked around in a constant state of amazement. I looked at other couple and wondered how they could be so calm about it. They held hands as if they weren't even holding hands.

I cried in English, I cried in French, I cried in all the languages, because tears are the same all around the world. Esperanto.

She was standing on the moon and if I responded I would be on the moon too, right next to her.

At its best, my system gives me a smoother living experience. My days become dreamlike, no edges anywhere, none of the snags and snafus that life is so famous for. After days and days alone it gets silky to the point where I can't even feel myself anymore, it's as if I don't exist.

I wondered how many other things had flown past me into death. Perhaps many. Perhaps I was flying past them, like the grim reaper, signaling the end. This would explain so much.

When I said "a lot of work," I moved my hands apart to represent all the work. He stared at the space between my palms and asked if I played the accordion. I could feel the accordion between my hands and how impressed he would be if I said yes.

Was I like honey thinking it's a small bear, not realizing the bear is just the shape of its bottle?

It had not occurred to me that it would get this bad, that indignity would dance upon bloodshed.

I wanted to be the kind of teacher who learned from her students.

The longer I stood there, the longer I had to stand there. It was intricate and exponential. I looked like I was doing nothing, but really I was as busy as a physicist or a politician. I was strategizing my next move. That my next move was always not to move didn't make it any easier.

Where did they go, those things we did?