Quotes from Miranda July

We could smell each other's shampoo and the laundry detergents we had chosen and I smelled that she didn't smoke but someone she loved did[...]

Tom looked across the patio, our eyes met, and for a split second I remembered my drunken nineteen-year-old face pressed against his chest at a party, his lips resting on the top of my head, murmuring, You know I wish I could.

I had forgotten about the baby. Until then she had been giving birth to birth—to contractions and noises and liquids. There was someone in there. We

Everyone knows that if you paint a human being entirely with house paint he will live, as long as you don't paint the bottom of his feet. It takes only a little thing like this to kill a person.

Why do you think we are the only animal that kisses? She was near again. Because the area in front of our faces is our most intimate zone. She drew a breath. This is why humans are the only romantic animal!

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.

I had written the same word seven thousand times attempting to alchemize time.

Always running and always wanting to go back but always being farther and farther away until finally it was just a scene in a movie where a girl says hello into the cauldron of the world and you are just a woman watching the movie with her husband on the couch and his legs are across your lap and you have to go to the bathroom.

I had a joint once and I didn't feel right for a whole year.

Multidisciplinary is just us applying a fractured mentality onto something that's actually whole.

If I went to the mall immediately and got a new sheet, then the chore wouldn't have time to gather weight. Once a task goes on the to-do list it settles in, grows roots—the trick is to preëmpt that.

One reason Helena and I would never be close friends is that I am about half as tall as she. 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.

You seem incredibly faraway to me, like someone on the other side of a lake. A dot so small that it isn't male or female or young or old; it is just smiling.

A real mother throws her heart over the fence and then climbs after it.

Their prayer was rage.

You will eat, you will laugh at stupid things, you will stay up all night just to see what it feels like, you will fall painfully in love, you will have babies of your own, you will doubt and regret and yearn and keep a secret. You will get old and decrepit, and you will die, exhausted from all that living.

Morning had gotten lost on the way home. We would lie this way forever, always saying goodbye, never parting.

I was an angel looking down into the world, into one car on the world, into two members of mankind, into their souls, and into the place behind their souls: the void.

I wanted her to know, from the moment she heard my voice, that I was dying. I delivered a salutation so craven, so wretched, that it fell through language like pebbles. Hello.

We held each other's hands and laughed with feigned embarrassment that gradually took hold and became real.

I was never good at jumping in, letting go of one element and embracing another.

I always had to resist the urge to go to him like a wife, as if we'd already been a couple for a hundred thousand lifetimes. Caveman and cavewoman. King and queen. Nuns

Then Potato ran by. He was a little brown dog, just like the woman said. He tore past me like he was about to miss a plane. He was gone by the time I even realized it had to be Potato. But he looked joyful, and I thought: Good for him. Live the dream, Potato.

But we couldn't see to form a chain of doubt between each other's eyes. And her voice had a vibrant certainty that made believing her feel liberating and obvious.