Quotes from Miranda July

I decided, right there in the darkness of the hallway, that I wanted this.

Did she think it was temporary? Or maybe that was the point of love: not to think.

We had loved people we really shouldn't have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible loves, or we had called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.

That said, the spaces between my features are in perfect proportion to each other. So far no one has noticed this. Also my ears: darling little shells. I wear my hair tucked behind them and try to enter crowded rooms ear-first, walking sideways.

We grew still and stared at each other. It seemed incredibly dangerous to look into each other's eyes, but we were doing it. For how long can you behold another person? Before you have to think of yourself again, like dipping the brush back in for more ink. For a very long time, you didn't need to get more ink, there was no reason to get anything else, because she was as good as me, she lived on earth like me, she suffered as I did.

It was like a dream, where the most unlikely person can't get enough of you- a movie star or someone's husband. How can this be? But the attraction is mutual and undeniable; it is the reason for itself.

We are social animals, and everything we do is because of other people, because we love them, or because we don't.

But it had another layer to it, because imitating crass people was kind of liberating—like pretending to be a child or a crazy person. It was something you could do only with someone you really trusted, someone who knew how capable and good you actually were.

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.

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.

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 and ounces, was a relief.

People love to make life harder than it has to be.

There had been options, before the baby, but none of them had been pursued... I had been quiet when there was no reason to be quiet, consisten when consistency didn't matter. For the last twenty years I had lived as if I were taking care of a newborn baby.

The boy was growing bored and this was a form of growing up.

They were sparkling with the old love, the greatest love of my lifetime. And they were triumphant.

We thrust our babies into the air again and again, showing them what it felt like to be a mother, to be terrifyingly in love without the option of getting off.

I didn't bathe him because I was too afraid he would slip out of my hands or his belly button would open. Then one night I woke at three A.M. certain he was rotting like a chicken carcass. Only as I lowered him into the sink did I realize this was a crazy time to wash a baby and I began to cry because he was so trusting—I could do anything and he would go along with it, the little fool.

I was still feeling the old loss, just in a new way.

And it struck me that maybe True magazine had been wrong. Maybe there are no New Men. Maybe there are only the living and the dead, and all those who are living deserve each other and are equal to each other.

But, like ivy, we grow where there is room for us. She seemed to have room for me; she never turned away in the pauses that allow for turning away.

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.

I was actually writhing in heartache, as if I were a single muscle whose purpose was to mourn.

I smiled into the air the way I smiled when customers unbuckled their belts, and I made my eyes laugh as if everything were some version of a good time.

People tend to stick to their own size group because it's easier on the neck.