Miranda July

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Your sentimentality softens all the edges, you’re misremembering. Take a moment to recall it as it really was: fucking hell.”

“Now began the part of her life where she was just very beautiful, except for nothing. Only winners will know what this feels like. Have you ever wanted something very badly and then gotten it? Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be.”

“I knew the beginning and the end – I just had to dream up a convincing middle.”

“I went to work the next day out of curiosity, as people return to their villages after the war to see what is left.”

“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.”

“The word God asks a question and then answers it before there is any chance to wonder.”

“Someone is getting excited. Somebody somewhere is shaking with excitement because something tremendous is about to happen to this person. This person has dressed for the occasion. This person has hoped and dreamed and now it is really happening and this person can hardly believe it. But believing is not an issue here, the time for faith and fantasy is over, it is really really happening. It involves stepping forward and bowing. Possibly there is some kneeling, such as when one is knighted. One is almost never knighted. But this person may kneel and receive a tap on each shoulder with a sword. Or, more likely, this person will be in a car or a store or under a vinyl canopy when it happens. Or online or on the phone. It could be an e-mail re: your knighthood. Or a long, laughing, rambling phone message in which every person this person has ever known is talking on a speakerphone and they are all saying, You have passed the test, it was all just a test, we were only kidding, real life is so much better than that. This person is laughing out loud with relief and playing the message back to get the address of the place where every person this person has ever known is waiting to hug this person and bring her into the fold of life. It is really exciting, and it’s not just a dream, it’s real.”

“He's stuck at 3:14 a.m. with only the moon to talk to.”

“When I was fifteen, a dark shape came into my room at night. It was dark, but it glowed, which is the first of many facts you will have to tackle with your imagination. It wasn't in the shape of a person, but right away I knew it was like a person in every way except for how it looked. As it turns out, our looks are not the main thing that makes us human.”

“Teachers of subjects that this person wasn't even good at are kissing this person and renouncing the very subjects they taught. Math teachers are saying that math was just a funny way of saying "I love you.”

“Well,I have a theory that men don't actually cry less than women,they just do it differently. Since we never saw our fathers cry,we are forced to invent our own unique method.”

“We were anxious to begin our life as people who had no people. And it was easy to find an apartment because we had no standards; we were just amazed that it was *our* door, *our* rotting carpet, *our* cockroach infestation... 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 hardly 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 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 to set it to music.”

“He stood right in front of me and pinched my arm and said, Can I see your room?Such relief. Even the pinch was good. I understood completely about needing to hurt someone at the same time that you are giving them something.”

“وینسنت همسری دارد به نام هلنا. او یونانی است و موهای بلندی دارد. رنگ‌شان کرده‌است. می‌خواستم مبادی آداب باشم و نگویم که رنگ‌شان کرده‌است اما فکر نمی‌کنم برایش اهمیتی داشته باشد اگر دیگران هم بدانند رنگ موهایش طبیعی نیست. حالا هم که ریشه‌ی موها خودشان را نشان‌ داده‌اند دیگر قیافه‌اش کاملا شبیه کسی شده که موهایش را رنگ کرده. چه می‌شد اگر من و او دوستان صمیمی بودیم. چه می‌شد اگر لباس‌هایش را به من قرض می‌داد و می‌گفت، این به تو بیشتر می‌آد، پیشت بمونه. چه می‌شد اگر در میان اشک و آه مرا صدا می‌زد و من می‌آمدم آن‌جا و او را در آشپزخانه دلداری می‌دادم و وینسنت می‌خواست بیاید توی آشپزخانه و ما می‌گفتیم نیا تو. حرف‌ها زنونه‌اس! چنین صحنه‌ای را در تلویزیون دیده‌ام. دو تا زن داشتند درباره‌ی لباس‌های زیر گمشده حرف می‌زدند و یک مرد می‌خواست بیاید تو و آن‌ها گفتند نیا تو. حرف‌ها زنونه‌اس. یک دلیل این‌که من و هلنا هیچ‌وقت دوستان صمیمی نخواهیم شد این است که او قدش دوبرابر من است. اکثر مردم دوست دارند با آدم‌هایی که همقد و اندازه‌ی خودشان باشند دوست شوند، چون این‌طوری گردن‌شان اذیت نمی‌شود. البته اگر بحث عشق و عاشقی در میان باشد موضوع فرق می‌کند چون در آن حالت تفاوت سایز خیلی هم به نظر طرفین جذاب می‌رسد. معنی‌اش این است که من همه‌جوره با تو کنار می‌آیم..”

“For a split second I felt as though she was nobody special in the larger scheme of my life. She was just some girl who had tied me to her leg to help her sink when she jumped off the bridge. Then I blinked and was in love with her again.”

“LA isn’t a walking city, or a subway city, so if someone isn’t in my house or my car we’ll never be together, not even for a moment. And just to be absolutely sure of that, 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.”

“It occurred to me that everyone’s story matters to themselves, so the more I listened, the more she wanted to talk.”

“In my paranoid world every storekeeper thinks I’m stealing, every man thinks I’m a prostitute or a lesbian, every woman thinks I’m a lesbian or arrogant, and every child and animal sees the real me and it is evil.”

“It was an act of devotion. A little like writing or loving someone — it doesn’t always feel worthwhile, but not giving up somehow creates unexpected meaning over time.”

“He was worried she would not let him love her with the stain. He had already decided long ago, twenty or thirty minutes ago, that the stain was fine. He had only seen it for a moment, but he was already used to it. It was good. It somehow allowed them to have more.”

“We were always getting away with something, which implied that someone was always watching us, which mean were are not alone in this world.”

“In the recurring dream everything has already fallen down, and I’m underneath. I’m crawling, sometimes for days, under the rubble. And as I crawl I realize that this one was the Big One. It was the earthquake that shook the whole world, and every single thing was destroyed. But this isn’t the scary part. That part always comes right before I wake up. I am crawling and then suddenly I remember: the earthquake happened years ago. This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is how life is. In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy for dreaming something else.”

“I nodded, pretending I was relaxed. I watched the sunlight sparkling on the water and practiced mind-body integration for a few seconds by quietly hyperventilating.”

“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.”

“As if I feared that the scope of what I could feel and imagine was being quietly limited by the world within a world, the internet. The things outside of the web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant. The blogs of strangers had to be read daily, and people nearby who had no web presence were becoming almost cartoonlike, as if they were missing a dimension. It was just happening, like time, like geography. The web seemed so inherently endless that it didn't occur to me what wasn't there. My appetite for pictures and videos and news and music was so gigantic now that if something was shrinking, something immesurable, how would I notice?...Most of life is offline, and I think it always will be; eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body. But it's not impossible to imagine loosing my appetite for those things; they aren't always easy, and they take so much time.”

“Most of life is offline, and I think it always will be; 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. In twenty years I'd be interviewing air and water and heat just to remember they mattered.”

“We come from long lines of people destined never to meet.”

“I wish there were a class where we could just keep going around the circle. around and around, until we had finally said everything about ourselves.”

“Did you ever really love her? Not really no. But me? Yes. Even though I have no pizzazz?”

“If you are sad, ask yourself why you are sad. Then pick up the phone and call someone and tell him the answer to the question. If you don't know anyone, call the operator and tell him. Most people don't know that the operator has to listen, it is a law. Also, the postman is not allowed to go inside your house, but you can talk to him on public property for up to four minutes or until he wants to go, whichever comes first.”

“Where do we come from? Do souls really exist? I can't answer these questions, especially not at 6am.”

“In an ideal world, we would have been orphans. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents.”

“All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.”

“… it wasn’t pretend, I wasn’t in a fairytale or a fable. I shut my eyes and absorbed the silent whoomp that always accompanies this revelation. It’s the sound of the real world, gigantic and impossible, replacing the smaller version of reality that I wear like a bonnet, clutched tightly under my chin.”

“I supposed this was one reason why people got married, to make a fiction that was tellable. It wasn’t just movies that couldn’t contain the full cast of characters — it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew where to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing. But together or alone, we were still embedded in a kaleidoscope, ruthlessly varied and continuous, until the end of the end.”

“Some people are uncomfortable with silences. Not me. I’ve never cared much for call and response. Sometimes I will think of something to say and then I ask myself: is it worth it? And it just isn’t.”

“I steeled myself against laughter; I would rather die than laugh. I didn’t laugh, I did not laugh. But I died, I did die.”

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

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

“It was a small thing, but it was a thing, and things have a way of either dying or growing, and it wasn’t dying.”

“There was nothing in this world that was not a con, suddenly I understood this. Nothing really mattered, and nothing could be lost. ”

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

“Things usually make sense in time, and even bad decisions have their own kind of correctness.”

“You always feel like you are the only one in the world, like everyone else is crazy for each other, but it's not true. Generally, people don't like each other very much. And that goes for friends, too.”

“They wordlessly excused each other for not loving each other as much as they had planned to. There were empty rooms in the house where they had meant to put their love, and they worked together to fill these rooms with midcentury modern furniture. ("Birthmark").”

“I expelled my dust, the powder of everything I had destroyed with doubt, and he pulled it into his lungs.”

“It wasn't good, he wasn't good, he did not have good intentions. I stood there, and he stood there. He breathed out the bitter air that makes women doubt everything, and I breathed it in, as I had always done.”