Quotes from Miranda July

and together we pushed through paragraphs, painstakingly sounding out the words, knitting them into human sentences that said very little.

Each word he said was boring, but collectively the melody of them lulled me. I tried to resist, but just the weight of him, in pounds

A teenage Filipino boy walked up to the car and just stood there, the way people do when disaster strikes.

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.

Quería perforarlo, hacerle un agujero y llenar ese agujero con mi cuerpo.

faces are disfigured with love

Each day I wondered what would happen next. What happens when you stop wanting, when you are happy.

I have to do it to day. It's the first day of the rest of my life. Oh. I had a day like that last week. Really? What happened? I woke up and thought, This is the first day of the rest of my life. Then what happened? I drove to work. Oh.

Not everyone has to be literate, there are some great reasons for resisting language, and one of them is love.

Vincent was on a shared patio. I'll tell you about Vincent. He is an example of a New Man. You might have read the article about the New Men in the True Magazine last month. New Men are more in touch with their feelings than even women, and New Men cry. New Men want to have children, they long to give birth, so sometimes when they cry, it is because they can't do this; there is just nowhere for a baby to come out.

I kept getting older while he stayed young, my tiny husband.

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.

I could see it so clearly, the zygote-shiney and bulbous, filled with the electric memory of being two but now dammed with the eternal loneliness of being just one.

I flitted around the city either turning heads or else walking by heads just as they were turning.

I realize 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.

It's okay; I know you want them to look at you. Who? Men. No, I don't. If you do that, then I can't be with you anymore. This was, in a way, the most romantic thing she had ever said to me. It implied that we were living together not because we had grown up together and were the only people we knew, but because of something else. Because we both didn't want men to look at me.

She had not even put on her clothes; she was still wearing the robe. And she was yelling "Potato" so desperately that she was forgetting to stick her head out the window, she was yelling into the interior of the car uselessly, as if Potato were within her, like God.

I pretended I was pausing before telling him about the secret feeling of joy 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 thought these were just my starter friends and the real ones would come along later. But no. These are my real friends

I ran a bath. Just before I stepped in the tub, I heard the front door close and froze in midstep; she was gone. Sometimes she did this. In the moments where other couples would fight or come together, she left me.

The subtitle of the book was Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships. I was working through it, word by word. So far I had done Keeping and was just starting on Love. I worried that by the time I got to Committed and Relationships, I would have forgotten Keeping. Not to mention Alive and all the other words.

It doesn't really feel like driving when you don't know where you are going. There should be an option on the car for driving in place, like treading water. or at least a light that shines between the brake lights that you can turn on to indicate that you have no destination.

Past a certain age, they give up on the name games, which is regrettable for someone like me who loves anything that involves going around a circle and saying something about yourself. I wish there was a class where we could just keep going around the circle, around and around, until we had finally said everything about ourselves.

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.