Miranda July Quotes

“What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real.”

— Miranda July

“I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again.”

— Miranda July

“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.”

— Miranda July

“Don't wait to be sure. Move, move, move.”

— Miranda July

“He seemed to be waiting for me to move forward. Weren't we all.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

“We were excited about getting jobs; we hardly went anywhere without filling out an application. But once we were hired - as furniture sanders - we could not believe this was really what people did all day. Everything we had thought of as The World was actually the result of someone's job. Each line on the sidewalk, each saltine. Everyone had a rotting carpet and a door to pay for. Aghast, we quit. There had to be a more dignified way to live. We needed time to consider ourselves, to come up with a theory about who we were and set it to music.
Something That Needs Nothing”

— Miranda July

“In the weeks that followed, we amazed ourselves. Our habits slid apart easily ... And our very few intimacies were simply discontinued. Where did they go, those things we did? Were they recycled? Did some new couple in China do them? Were a Swedish man and woman foot to foot at this very moment?”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

“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.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

“The funny thing about my procrastination was that I was almost done with the screenplay. I was like a person who had fought dragons and lost limbs and crawled through swamps and now, finally, the castle was visible. I could see tiny children waving flags on the balcony; all I had to do was walk across a field to get to them. But all of a sudden I was very, very sleepy. And the children couldn't believe their eyes as I folded down to my knees and fell to the ground face-first, with my eyes open. Motionless, I watched ants hurry in and out of a hole and I knew that standing up again would be a thousand times harder than the dragon or the swamp and so I did not even try. I just clicked on one thing after another after another.”

— Miranda July

“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.”

— Miranda July

“I asked myself if I would kill my parents to save his life, a question I had been posing since I was fifteen. The answer always used to be yes. But in time, all those boys had faded away, and my parents were still there. I was now less and less willing to kill them for anyone; in fact, I worried for their health. In this case, however, I had to say yes. Yes, I would.”

— Miranda July

Was she terrifyingly beautiful? Was she so ignorant she didn't deserve the truth? Was she also a liar and thus it was something they did together? I don't believe in psychology; which says everything you do is because of yourself. That is so untrue. We are social animals, and everything we do is because of other people, because we love them, or because we don't.

— Miranda July

“There were a series of closing kisses, goodbye kisses, kisses placed like lids on boxes-then the lid would pop off and need to be replaced. There, this is the final kiss-no, this is the final kiss. This one is, it really is. And now I'm just kissing that kiss good night.”

— Miranda July

I felt like I could do this forever, because nothing mattered more than anything else.

— Miranda July

This person mourns the fact that she has ruined her one chance to be loved by everyone; as this person climbs into bed, the weight of this tragedy seems to bear down upon this person's chest. And it is a comforting weight, almost human in heft. This person sighs. This person's eyes begin to close, this person sleeps.

— Miranda July

Was all this real to her? Did she think it was temporary? Or maybe that was the point of love: not to think.

— Miranda July

“Like a rich person, I live with a full-time servant who keeps everything in order-and because the servant is me, there's no invasion of privacy.”

— Miranda July

“Nothing really mattered, and nothing could be lost.”

— Miranda July

Every night my plan was to make it to dawn and then feel out the options. But that was just it
there were no options. There had been options, before the baby, but none of them had been pursued. I had not flown to Japan by myself to see what it was like there. I had not gone to nightclubs and said Tell me everything about yourself to strangers. I had not even gone to the movies by myself. I had been quiet when there was no reason to be quiet and consistent when consistency didn't matter. For the last twenty years I had lived as if I was taking care of a newborn baby.

— Miranda July

“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.”

— Miranda July

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.

— Miranda July

“A howl was curdling inside me; the ache felt inhuman. Or maybe this was my first human feeling.”

— Miranda July

“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.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

“It was Kelda who said she wished there was a pool in Belvedere, because they were obviously very lucky to have a swim coach living in town. I hadn't said I was a swim coach, but I knew what she meant. It was a shame.
Then a strange thing happened. I was looking down at my shoes on the brown linoleum floor and I was thinking about how I bet this floor hadn't been washed in a million years and I suddenly felt like I was going to die. But instead of dying, I said: I can teach you how to swim. And we don't need a pool.”

— Miranda July

“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!”

— Miranda July

“We still kissed frequently, usually a cluster of small pecks. An acronym for our early deep kisses. Which in a way was more intimate because only we knew what it stood for.”

— Miranda July

“I explained about how we were in Rick's hands and also how he had washed his hands.”

— Miranda July

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.

— Miranda July

In truth, I had not yet learned how to hate anyone but my parents. I was actually just standing there in love. I was not even really standing; if she had walked away suddenly, I would have fallen.

— Miranda July

“But I knew jumping was like dying, I would have to let go of everything.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

“My job is to have new ideas and take risks every day, so I'm always looking forward to the next thing being done or making the next thing that I haven't yet gotten to. That's sort of the constant in my life.”

— Miranda July

I'm not a cinephile. My films don't reference films. I'm more interested in rhythm and feeling.

— Miranda July

I definitely wanted much more normalness than what was around me.

— Miranda July

“The things keeping you back-these embarrassing, boring, stupid obstacles-are the heart of what it is to be human. They're the whole reason for making and needing art. So you might as well go ahead and begin in whatever way you can right now.”

— Miranda July

“Very few women have become famous for being who they actually are, nuanced and imperfect. When honesty happens, it's usually couched in self-ridicule or self-help. Dunham doesn't apologize like that-she simply tells her story as if it might be interesting. The result is shocking and radical because it is utterly familiar. Not That Kind of Girl is hilarious, artful, and staggeringly intimate; I read it shivering with recognition.”

— Miranda July

“Somewhat predictably, I'm much more comfortable in front of an audience - and a big audience is even better - than faced with one stranger. This always seems like a bit of a failing on my part, as a human. I think that's also why I put myself situations where I'm forced to engage in other ways.”

— Miranda July

There's all different kinds of people, but I don't think it's that unusual that once you get like a little power, you get to do your weird thing even more.

— Miranda July

“I'm always just trying to get the work done so that I can be free - like, with the sense that, like, the real me has no interest in this? I just gotta do it for my boss. But the catch is that I'm never free, I never finish the work, so I don't know who this freewheeling employee with extracurricular interests is.”

— Miranda July

“The thing I am most interested in is power relations - it is so easy to imagine that the other person is living a perfect life.”

— Miranda July

“To get anything done, you used to have to brush past, or at least lay eyes on, someone whose reality was totally different from your own. That used to be inevitable. If that goes away because everything's so convenient, everything's brought to you, well, then there goes one of my favorite parts of life, and something that I've gone out of my way to court.”

— Miranda July

The level of control, that's part of what's so appealing about filmmaking - you have so much control over what the reader, the viewer, is noticing from moment to moment. They can't do that boring boring boring thing as easily.

— Miranda July

Most great filmmakers are good at place. Like how people say, like, "The city itself is a character in the movie," you know? I'm so interior. I always forget there's such a thing as an exterior wide shot, where you can see where someone is. As opposed to just: how can we show what this person is thinking, in an abstract way that is felt?

— Miranda July

“I don't think I'm more of a screenwriter than I am a fiction writer. I'm more of a reader than a film-watcher, so I imagine that I'm not approaching fiction or films in a particularly cinematic way.”

— Miranda July

“He pulled away, but his eyes held my eyes like hands.”

— Miranda July