Top 180 Miranda July Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Miranda July

52. “That day I carried the dream around like a full glass of water, moving gracefully so I would not lose any of it.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

55. “Was I like honey thinking it’s a small bear, not realizing the bear is just the shape of its bottle?”

— Miranda July

56. “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.”

— Miranda July

57. “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.”

— Miranda July

58. “This person realizes that staying home means blowing off everyone this person has ever known. But the desire to stay in is very strong. This person wants to run a bath and then read in bed.”

— Miranda July

59. “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

60. “I like embracing kind of normal forms but am always trying to approach them as if no one’s ever done that before. As if I’m literally the first person to ever write a book.”

— Miranda July

61. “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

62. “I’m interested in what the virtues of all those things are, especially for the kind of person who’s made their own world that revolves around them, like writers do. It seems especially precious.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

64. “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.”

— Miranda July

65. “The life you live in front of an audience is like an altered state – it’s not totally real. I’m always, even in the course of one day, trying to find ways to balance both sides.”

— Miranda July

66. “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

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

— Miranda July

68. “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

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

— Miranda July

70. “It was a tiny sound but it woke me up because it was a human sound.”

— Miranda July

71. “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.”

— Miranda July

72. “He breathed out the bitter air that makes women doubt everything, and I breathed it in, as I had always done. I expelled my dust, the powder of everything I had destroyed with doubt, and he pulled it into his lungs.”

— Miranda July

73. “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

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

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

77. “I drove to the doctor’s office as if I was starring in a movie Phillip was watching – windows down, hair blowing, just one hand on the wheel. When I stopped at red lights, I kept my eyes mysteriously forward. Who is she? people might have been wondering. Who is that middle-aged woman in the blue Honda?”

— Miranda July

78. “I actually don’t have a great surplus of ideas. Some evolve very slowly, over many years, but I sort of trust that all of the interesting ones will become something that I eventually end up doing.”

— Miranda July

79. “Sometimes I looked at her sleeping face, the living flesh of it, and was overwhelmed by how precarious it was to love a living thing. She could die simply from lack of water. It hardly seemed safer than falling in love with a plant.”

— Miranda July

80. “When I write, I wear earplugs. I don’t want to be self-conscious. I don’t want to be thinking about the fact that I’m thinking about it. I just want to be in it. It’s one element of hypnosis.”

— Miranda July

81. “I really did not feel okay about any of this, and there was really nothing I could do about any of it.”

— Miranda July

82. “I would always be earthbound; he hadn’t robbed me of my ability to fly or to live forever. I appreciated nuns now, not the conscripted kind, but modern women who chose it. If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?”

— Miranda July

83. “She bludgeoned me with a look of such limitless compassion that I immediately began to cry.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

85. “I made orange juice from concentrate and showed her the trick of squeezing the juice of one real orange into it. It removes the taste of being frozen. She marveled at this, and 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

86. “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.”

— Miranda July

87. “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.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

89. “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.”

— Miranda July

90. “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.”

— Miranda July

91. “I was going to die and it was taking forever.”

— Miranda July

92. “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.”

— Miranda July

93. “When I was very little, I probably wanted to be more normal. I probably wanted the Laura Ashley bedroom, and instead I got thrift-store everything.”

— Miranda July

94. “It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

96. “I pressed my lips against his ear and whispered again, It’s not your fault. Perhaps this was really the only thing I had ever wanted to say to anyone, and be told.”

— Miranda July

97. “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

98. “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.”

— Miranda July

99. “I had a joint once and I didn’t feel right for a whole year.”

— Miranda July

100. “I could see it so clearly, the zygote- shiny and bulbous, filled with the electric memory of being two but now damned with the eternal loneliness of being just one. The sorrow that never goes away.”

— Miranda July