Top 200 Miranda July Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Miranda July

156. “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

157. “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

158. “The singer was lifted up and illuminated with gratitude, not for any one thing, but for the whole of his life, even for the agony. Even in Latin you could tell he was thanking God for the agony in particular, for the way it allowed him to cleave so tightly to the world.”

— Miranda July

159. “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.”

— Miranda July

160. “Maybe he wouldn’t say anything, which is the worst thing men do.”

— Miranda July

161. “Their prayer was rage.”

— Miranda July

162. “You know what? Forget what I just said. You’re already a part of this. 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. That is when you get to die. Not now.”

— Miranda July

163. “But we couldn’t see to form a chain of doubt between each other’s eyes. And her voice had a vibrant certainty that made believing her feel liberating and obvious.”

— Miranda July

164. “Each day I wondered what would happen next. What happens when you stop wanting, when you are happy.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

166. “So this was what it was like not to be me.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

168. “He drank the cotton-candy milk from the day at the pier. The last batch was from the morning she left and this milk was full of plans I didn’t know about. When he finished that bottle she was really gone, every last drop of her.”

— Miranda July

169. “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

170. “I went home early to study my apartment before the class. I wanted to look at everything through her eyes. 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

171. “She was a very beautiful person who was missing something very ugly. Her winnings were the absence of something, and this quality hung around her.”

— Miranda July

172. “Where did they go, those things we did?”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

174. “Tom looked across the patio, our eyes met, and for a split second I remembered my drunken nineteen-year-old face pressed against his chest at a party, his lips resting on the top of my head, murmuring, You know I wish I could.”

— Miranda July

175. “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

176. “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

177. “I feel into the eyes of every person I passed on the street.”

— Miranda July

178. “I had written the same word seven thousand times attempting to alchemize time.”

— Miranda July

179. “Ce n’est pas de votre faute.”

— Miranda July

180. “We held each other’s hands and laughed with feigned embarrassment that gradually took hold and became real.”

— Miranda July

181. “That’s the problem with men my age, I’m somehow older than them.”

— Miranda July

182. “At five o’clock I have to consciously dial myself down before reentering the house, like astronaut Buzz Aldrin preparing to unload the dishwasher immediately after returning from the moon. Don’t talk about the moon, I remind myself. Ask everyone how their day was.”

— Miranda July

183. “Was this the secret to everything? This bodily freedom? It felt intuitive and healthy, as if promiscuity was my birthright as a woman. Maybe it was. Was this the skeleton in civilization’s closet? The reason why men had come down so hard on us since the start of time?”

— Miranda July

184. “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 to hope for something else.”

— Miranda July

185. “The rest of the time we respectfully forgave each other for utterly failing to be what we felt we deserved.”

— Miranda July

186. “I started doing several different breathing exercises at once that all canceled each other out.”

— Miranda July

187. “You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new.”

— Miranda July

188. “With a baby one could no longer be cute and coy about capitalism – money was time, time was everything. We could have skipped lightly across all this by not becoming parents; it never really had to come to a head.”

— Miranda July

189. “Picture how the vaginal canal squeezes the water out of a baby’s lungs – it’s the shock of this squeezing and the sudden cold air that makes the baby cry out and take their first breath!” She inhaled so I inhaled, too. “The trauma itself prepares them for the next phase, life on Earth.”

— Miranda July

190. “Are we totally sure about the domestication of animals? Will we not look back on this as a kind of slavery?”

— Miranda July

191. “Back when Harris and I slept together I would often whisper, Let’s dream the same dream, right after we turned out the lights. He took it as a sweet sign-off, but I yearned for this joint dream so hard my teeth hurt. He didn’t understand that you could create a world – a fantasy, a nightmare – and bring other people into it, not just artistically but in life. I was pretty good at getting people to meet me in my mind, but ultimately no one wanted to stay there.”

— Miranda July

192. “It wasn’t over. The past could come back, fully formed, at any moment, unlocked by a random combination of sounds and movements.”

— Miranda July

193. “Life didn’t just get better and better. You could actually miss out on something and that was that. That was your chance and now it was over.”

— Miranda July

194. “A lot of women destroy their lives in their forties and then one day they wake up with no periods and no partner and only themselves to blame.”

— Miranda July

195. “My face reddened. It wasn’t just Audra I’d dragged through the mud; it was every woman old enough to be my mother. Including – just recently – myself.”

— Miranda July

196. “Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it. A latent bias, internalized by both of us, suddenly leapt forth in parenthood. It was now obvious that Harris was openly rewarded for each thing he did while I was quietly shamed for the same things. There was no way to fight back against this, no one to point a finger at, because it came from everywhere.”

— Miranda July

197. “I stood holding the note with that funny little abandoned feeling one gets a million times a day in a domestic setting. I could have cried, but why? It’s not like I need to dish with my husband about every little thing; that’s what friends are for. Harris and I are more formal, like two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned our drink. Forever thirsty but forever wanting the other one to take the first sip.”

— Miranda July

198. “So much of what I had thought of as femininity was really just youth.”

— Miranda July

199. “At the height of our ascent we were middle-aged and then we fell for the rest of our lives, the whole second half. Falling might take just as long, but it was nothing like rising. The whole time you were rising you could not imagine what came next in your particular, unique journey; you could not see around the corner. Whereas falling ended the same way for everyone.”

— Miranda July

200. “A person with a journeying, experimental soul should be living a life that allowed for it. The past wasn’t my fault; of course I had been using prefab structures – not knowing any better – but now I was older and could see my new path clearly, extending from tonight and ending when I died. I get it, I whispered into the darkness. And thank you, I added, because we hadn’t talked in a while.”

— Miranda July