Top 180 Miranda July Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “That is my problem with life, I rush through it, like I’m being chased. Even things whose whole point is slowness, like drinking relaxing tea. When I drink relaxing tea, I suck it down as if I’m in a contest for who can drink relaxing tea the quickest. Or if I’m in a hot tub with some other people and we’re all looking up at the stars, I’ll be the first to say, It’s so beautiful here. The sooner you say, It’s so beautiful here, the quicker you can say, Wow, I’m getting overheated.”

— Miranda July

102. “My earliest memory is aged three, seeing sunlight on water and feeling it was really magical.”

— Miranda July

103. “I felt like I wasn’t living thoroughly enough – I was distracted in ways I wouldn’t be if I’d been born in 1929.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

105. “What was the lifespan of these improbable loves? An hour. A week. A few months at best. The end was a natural thing, like the seasons, like getting older, fruit turning. That was the saddest part – there was no one to blame and no way to reverse.”

— Miranda July

106. “I went to the bedroom and lay on the floor, so as not to mess up the covers.”

— Miranda July

107. “I was never good at jumping in, letting go of one element and embracing another.”

— Miranda July

108. “He loved me. He was a complex person with layers of percolating emotions, some of them spiritual, some tortured in a more secular way, and he burned for me. This complicated flame of being was mine.”

— Miranda July

109. “People tend to stick to their own size group because it’s easier on the neck.”

— Miranda July

110. “Narrative and characters have always interested me. I never tried to alienate an audience. Of course, gradually, I wanted a bigger and bigger space to draw people in, so it’s very organic.”

— Miranda July

111. “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

112. “Since I started making art, I’ve always had some kind of project that was really about and for other people, because I think I just need that balance to feel sane myself – you know?”

— Miranda July

113. “I had forgotten about the baby. Until then she had been giving birth to birth – to contractions and noises and liquids. There was someone in there. We.”

— Miranda July

114. “Always running and always wanting to go back but always being farther and farther away until finally it was just a scene in a movie where a girl says hello into the cauldron of the world and you are just a woman watching the movie with her husband on the couch and his legs are across your lap and you have to go to the bathroom.”

— Miranda July

115. “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.”

— Miranda July

116. “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.”

— Miranda July

117. “The usual treatment is psychotherapy.” “I know.” I didn’t explain that I was single. Therapy is for couples. So is Christmas. So is camping. So is beach camping.”

— Miranda July

118. “I hated my job, but I liked that I could do it.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

120. “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.”

— Miranda July

121. “When you live alone people are always thinking they can stay with you, when the opposite is true: who they should stay with is a person whose situation is already messed up by other people and so one more won’t matter.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

123. “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.”

— Miranda July

124. “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

125. “She looked utterly betrayed, as betrayed as the most betrayed person in Shakespeare.”

— Miranda July

126. “Multidisciplinary is just us applying a fractured mentality onto something that’s actually whole.”

— Miranda July

127. “For the first six months I just walked around in a constant state of amazement. I looked at other couple and wondered how they could be so calm about it. They held hands as if they weren’t even holding hands.”

— Miranda July

128. “It had not occurred to me that it would get this bad, that indignity would dance upon bloodshed.”

— Miranda July

129. “I wouldn’t use a British accent out loud, but I’d be using one in my head and it would carry over.”

— Miranda July

130. “I was wondering if my life, the life in which I had a son and a beautiful, young girlfriend, could exist outside of the hospital. Or was the hospital its container? Was I like honey thinking it’s a small bear, not realizing the bear is just the shape of its bottle?”

— Miranda July

131. “I wondered how many other things had flown past me into death. Perhaps many. Perhaps I was flying past them, like the grim reaper, signaling the end. This would explain so much.”

— Miranda July

132. “My eyes fell on the gray linoleum floor and I wondered how many other women had sat on this toilet and stared at this floor. Each of them the center of their own world, all of them yearning for someone to put their love into so they could see their love, see that they had it.”

— Miranda July

133. “I wanted her to know, from the moment she heard my voice, that I was dying. I delivered a salutation so craven, so wretched, that it fell through language like pebbles. Hello.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

135. “There was no apology in her eyes, no love or caring. But she saw me, I existed, and this lifted the beams off my shoulders. It takes so little.”

— Miranda July

136. “Try not to base your decision on this room, it isn’t representative of the whole world. Somewhere the sun is hot on a rubbery leaf, clouds are making shapes and reshaping and reshaping, a spiderweb is broken but still works.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

138. “I’m not saying I asked for it, only that there are moments when we are sending signals not just to the boys in the room but to all of creation.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

140. “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

141. “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.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

143. “Tom began screaming, and I wondered if the baby’s soft brain was, in this moment, changing shape in response to the violent stimuli. I tried to intellectualize the noise to protect the baby’s psyche. I whispered: Isn’t that interesting to hear a man scream? Doesn’t that challenge our stereotypes of what men can do? And then I tried, Shhhhhhhhh.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

145. “Then Potato ran by. He was a little brown dog, just like the woman said. He tore past me like he was about to miss a plane. He was gone by the time I even realized it had to be Potato. But he looked joyful, and I thought: Good for him. Live the dream, Potato.”

— Miranda July

146. “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.”

— Miranda July

147. “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.”

— Miranda July

148. “At its best, my system gives me a smoother living experience. My days become dreamlike, no edges anywhere, none of the snags and snafus that life is so famous for. After days and days alone it gets silky to the point where I can’t even feel myself anymore, it’s as if I don’t exist.”

— Miranda July

149. “After a minute a willowy woman with a baby boy came out. The baby was swinging a crystal from a string. I checked to see if he and I had a special connection that was greater than his bond with his mother. We didn’t.”

— Miranda July

150. “When I said “a lot of work,” I moved my hands apart to represent all the work. He stared at the space between my palms and asked if I played the accordion. I could feel the accordion between my hands and how impressed he would be if I said yes.”

— Miranda July