Top 200 Miranda July Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “I was an angel looking down into the world, into one car on the world, into two members of mankind, into their souls, and into the place behind their souls: the void.”

— Miranda July

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Miranda July

157. “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

158. “Their prayer was rage.”

— Miranda July

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Miranda July

162. “It must happen all the time, a fleeting passion overwhelms someone’s true course and there’s nothing to be done about it.”

— Miranda July

163. “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

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

— Miranda July

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

175. “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

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

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

180. “Ce n’est pas de votre faute.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

182. “I feel such tenderness toward them. Try to remember this feeling, I say to myself. They are the same people up close as they are from here.”

— 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. “I was busy, too, but I always have time to worry.”

— Miranda July

185. “For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces- each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand. I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I turned.”

— Miranda July

186. “I was no closer to being sixty-five than twenty-five, but since time moved forward, not backward, sixty-five was tomorrow and twenty-five was moot.”

— Miranda July

187. “Every time Jordi and I met, the premise was that we had changed radically since the last meeting, and would again and again.”

— Miranda July

188. “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

189. “He doesn’t see how each moment can be made terrible if you only try. There can be a problem every second so that life is a sort of low-grade torture.”

— Miranda July

190. “The problem began right at the start, with one of us entirely inside the other, a state that seemed close but was fundamentally distant.”

— Miranda July

191. “Other couples might have crossed the room toward each other and kissed, but we understood the feeling would disappear if we got too close. It’s some kind of Greek tragedy, us, but not all told.”

— Miranda July

192. “The women I dated were often my age, that was fine. But the men always had to be older than me because if they were my same age then it became too obvious how much more powerful I was and this was a turnoff for both of us. Men needed a head start for it to be even.”

— Miranda July

193. “They were growing up. As we were becoming ourselves, they were, too, and the main thing, really, was not to steal their thunder.”

— Miranda July

194. “I thought I was laboring toward a prize, but the prize was right there, I already had it, and work was something I could do afterward, after I was no longer young enough to be beautiful and could no longer be wanted by someone beautiful.”

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

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

— Miranda July

197. “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

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

— Miranda July

199. “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

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

— Miranda July