Miranda July is a filmmaker, artist, and writer. Her most recent book is The First Bad Man, a novel. July’s collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and has been published in twenty-three countries. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker; It Chooses You was her first book of non-fiction. She wrote, directed, and starred in The Future and Me and You and Everyone We Know — winner of the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Special Jury Prize at Sundance, and re-released by The Criterion Collection in 2020. These Miranda July quotes will motivate you.
Best Miranda July Quotes
1. “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.” ~ Miranda July
2. “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
3. “Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it’s worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It’s okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.” ~ Miranda July
4. “Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can’t see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees.” ~ Miranda July
5. “Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can’t see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees.” ~ Miranda July
6. “That’s the artist’s job, really: continually setting yourself free, and giving yourself new options and new ways of thinking about things.” ~ Miranda July
7. “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
8. “Inelegantly, and without my consent, time passed.” ~ Miranda July
9. “Sometimes I lie in bed trying to decide which of my friends I truly care about, and I always come to the same conclusion: none of them. I thought these were just my starter friends and the real ones would come along later. But no. These are my real friends.” ~ Miranda July
10. “Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you.” ~ Miranda July
11. “Don’t wait to be sure. Move, move, move.” ~ Miranda July
12. “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
13. “It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.” ~ Miranda July
14. “What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real.” ~ Miranda July
15. “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.” ~ Miranda July
16. “Things usually make sense in time, and even bad decisions have their own kind of correctness.” ~ Miranda July
17. “We come from long lines of people destined never to meet.” ~ Miranda July
18. “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
19. “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.” ~ Miranda July quotes
20. “You’ve got the people you know, which are problematic. Always. They’re rich but they’re also real people living their lives alongside you. Then you’ve got the people that you make-up completely, who are often missing a dimension if they don’t have some reference to real people. So strangers exist in this in-between space, where in not knowing them, you are creating a fiction for them, even in passing, but at the same time, there they are, with their actual bodies and their actual clothes. It’s totally enticing.” ~ Miranda July
21. “… we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.” ~ Miranda July
22. “Very few women have become famous for being who they actually are, nuanced and imperfect. When honesty happens, it’s usually couched in self-ridicule or self-help. Dunham doesn’t apologize like that-she simply tells her story as if it might be interesting. The result is shocking and radical because it is utterly familiar. Not That Kind of Girl is hilarious, artful, and staggeringly intimate; I read it shivering with recognition.” ~ Miranda July
23. “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
24. “I was a lot dumber when I was writing the novel. I felt like worse of a writer because I wrote many of the short stories in one sitting or over maybe three days, and they didn’t change that much. There weren’t many, many drafts. That made me feel semi-brilliant and part of a magical process. Writing the novel wasn’t like that. I would come home every day from my office and say, “Well, I still really like the story, I just wish it was better written.” At that point, I didn’t realize I was writing a first draft. And the first draft was the hardest part.” ~ Miranda July
25. “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”).” ~ Miranda July
26. “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
27. “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
28. “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 of something else.” ~ Miranda July
29. “I knew the beginning and the end – I just had to dream up a convincing middle.” ~ Miranda July
30. “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.” ~ Miranda July
31. “I wondered if i would spend the rest of my life inventing complicated ways to depress myself.” ~ Miranda July
32. “I spend a lot of time obsessing about getting a dignified eight hours’ sleep.” ~ Miranda July
33. “I had a joint once and I didn’t feel right for a whole year” ~ Miranda July
34. “It is terrible to have to ask for anything ever. We wish we were something that needed nothing, like paint. But even paint needs repainting.” ~ Miranda July
35. “My job is to have new ideas and take risks every day, so I’m always looking forward to the next thing being done or making the next thing that I haven’t yet gotten to. That’s sort of the constant in my life.” ~ Miranda July
36. “But, like ivy, we grow where there is room for us.” ~ Miranda July
37. “I gave you things I wasn’t sure I even had.” ~ Miranda July
38. “If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his. You would die getting to him.” ~ Miranda July
39. “I cried in English, I cried in french, I cried in all the languages, because tears are the same all around the world.” ~ Miranda July
40. “I definitely wanted much more normalness than what was around me.” ~ Miranda July
41. “People ask, ‘Why would you cast yourself in your movie?’ And, for me, it’s more like an achievement that I am now not playing all the parts, you know? Like I was for so long, in all my performances and a lot of my short movies. So, that’s where I’m coming from, not out of a kind of actress-y sense of myself. I mean, I don’t really see myself as an actress, but more from performance: this is how you make something. You do it yourself. You’re in it and you write it. I think I keep doing it that way, ’cause it’s my way. It’s what makes me feel like I know how to do it.” ~ Miranda July
42. “Nothing really mattered, and nothing could be lost.” ~ Miranda July
43. “I didn’t have any vices before the Internet. There are a lot of cracks in the day, moments where you don’t know what to do next, so you have a little hole where you look at your phone. You want something that will mean you’re not alone in that moment.” ~ Miranda July
44. “I realize that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.” ~ Miranda July
45. “The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn’t allow you to be who you are, over the course of a lifetime, is still one of the most chilling nightmares to me. It’s a good metaphor for fears I have about losing my soul in some accidental, mundane way. So, to me, these jobs that my characters have are very loaded. They immediately suggest a complex character to me, a woman who is, say, a secretary, but also a vigilante on behalf of her own soul.” ~ Miranda July
46. “I moved his hair out of his face. I put my hand under his nose and felt gentle, even breaths. 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
47. “If you want to have a character who falls into crisis, all you have to do is turn the Internet off, and then we all understand how that feels, when you suddenly just have time and yourself.” ~ Miranda July
48. “We humans are here because nothing can be perfect. There always have to be some living things that are unsatisfied, itchy, trying too hard. If it was all just animals and rocks and lettuce, the gods wouldn’t feel like they had enough to do.” ~ Miranda July
49. “People tend to stick to their own size group because it’s easier on the neck. Unless they are romantically involved, in which case the size difference is sexy. It means: I am willing to go the distance for you.” ~ Miranda July
50. “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
51. “I really did not feel okay about any of this, and there was really nothing I could do about any of it.” ~ Miranda July
52. “Collections are certainly abundant online. It’s complicated, because it’s not like these people didn’t want computers, although there was some nonchalance about it. I would sometimes ask the people I interviewed if they wished they had a computer, and in a lot of cases, it was like they couldn’t process the question. You don’t know what you don’t have, I guess.” ~ Miranda July
53. “I’ve always been terrified of getting used to something that is actually killing me-a relationship or a job. But in those cases, you can count on a friend to say something. The Internet is different, because all my friends are in the same relationship.” ~ Miranda July
54. “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
55. “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
56. “She never inquired, but she never recoiled, either. This is a quality that I look for in a person, not recoiling.” ~ Miranda July
57. “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.” ~ Miranda July
58. “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.” ~ Miranda July
59. “She bludgeoned me with a look of such limitless compassion that I immediately began to cry.” ~ Miranda July
60. “The word God asks a question and then answers it before there is any chance to wonder.” ~ Miranda July
61. “I walked down the hall and saw that [she] was sitting on the floor next to a chair. This is always a bad sign. It’s a slippery slope, and it’s best just to sit in chairs, to eat when hungry, to sleep and rise and work. But we have all been there. Chairs are for people, and you’re not sure if you are one.” ~ Miranda July
62. “It was a tiny sound but it woke me up because it was a human sound.” ~ Miranda July
63. “The job of the artist is to point at things.” ~ Miranda July
64. “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.” ~ Miranda July
65. “An erratum is a correction inserted into a book after publication. It’s a nice thing to collect because you can’t go after them, you just come upon them. In 25 years I’ve only found about 12.” ~ Miranda July
