110+ Miranda July Quotes On Freedom, You And Everyone We Know

Miranda July is an American film director, writer, actress, and artist. She is best known for her films Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) and The Future (2011). She also wrote and starred in the short film, The Future (2005), which won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Miranda July on freedom, love, life.

Top 10 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.
2. But, like ivy, we grow where there is room for us.
3. 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.
4. What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real.
5. We come from long lines of people destined never to meet.
6. ... we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.
7. 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?
8. I eat an egg every morning, and when I'm done, I almost always have the thought: There. Now even if I'm captured and starved, I'll be able to live off the protein of that egg for a while.
9. That's the artist's job, really: continually setting yourself free, and giving yourself new options and new ways of thinking about things.
10. Live the dream, Potato.

Miranda July Short Quotes

• Things usually make sense in time, and even bad decisions have their own kind of correctness.
• Making a movie: It's so hard. It's the hardest of all the things I do.
• I was going to die and it was taking forever.
• My earliest memory is aged three, seeing sunlight on water and feeling it was really magical.
• I definitely wanted much more normalness than what was around me.
• I had a joint once and I didn't feel right for a whole year
• My way into making movies - into making things is general - has been through performing.
• I spend a lot of time obsessing about getting a dignified eight hours' sleep.
• I can guarantee you nothing I do is a conscious attempt to inject something in.
• I can't imagine being invested in someone else's script.

Miranda July Quotes About Love

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

He was worried she would not let him love her with the stain. He had already decided long ago, twenty or thirty minutes ago, that the stain was fine. He had only seen it for a moment, but he was already used to it. It was good. It somehow allowed them to have more. — Miranda July

Did you ever really love her? Not really no. But me? Yes. Even though I have no pizzazz? — Miranda July

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

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

When she saw my messy desk, she said she was the same way, and there was no dust on the TV, and I was easy to love. 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

I could not make a move without making love. — Miranda July

I looked out the window for other passengers in love with their drivers, but we were well disguised, we pretended boredom and prayed for traffic. — Miranda July

When you can see the beauty of a tree, then you will know what love is. — Miranda July

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

Miranda July Quotes About Life

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

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

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

My ideal life is just lounging around the house and every once in a while I'll kind of write something, and then I'll leave and eat something and masturbate or whatever - just this very fluid life of comforting myself. — Miranda July

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

I suppose the daily disciplines are just a reflection of the qualities of my inner world - a mixture of paralysis and terror and a lighter, freer, kind of rebellious woman. So those are just constantly pushing against each other, and that's played out in every area of my life. — Miranda July

Thus far, everything I've made has come out of my really feeling it, out of the fire of my life. — Miranda July

Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy to hope for something else. — Miranda July

I wondered if i would spend the rest of my life inventing complicated ways to depress myself. — Miranda July

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

Miranda July Quotes About Me And Everyone

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

It occurred to me that everyone’s story matters to themselves, so the more I listened, the more she wanted to talk. — Miranda July

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

Miranda July Quotes About Characters

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

I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me. — Miranda July

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 [growth]. — Miranda July

Miranda July Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

Most great filmmakers are good at place. Like how people say, like, "The city itself is a character in the movie," you know? I'm so interior. I always forget there's such a thing as an exterior wide shot, where you can see where someone is. As opposed to just: how can we show what this person is thinking, in an abstract way that is felt? — Miranda July

In my paranoid world every storekeeper thinks I’m stealing, every man thinks I’m a prostitute or a lesbian, every woman thinks I’m a lesbian or arrogant, and every child and animal sees the real me and it is evil. — Miranda July

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

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

It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them. — Miranda July

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

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

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

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

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

To get anything done, you used to have to brush past, or at least lay eyes on, someone whose reality was totally different from your own. That used to be inevitable. If that goes away because everything's so convenient, everything's brought to you, well, then there goes one of my favorite parts of life, and something that I've gone out of my way to court. — Miranda July

Was she terrifyingly beautiful? Was she so ignorant she didn't deserve the truth? Was she also a liar and thus it was something they did together? I don't believe in psychology; which says everything you do is because of yourself. That is so untrue. We are social animals, and everything we do is because of other people, because we love them, or because we don't. — Miranda July

It was a real whale, a photograph of a real whale. I looked into its tiny wise eye and wondered where that eye was now. Was it alive and swimming, or had it died long ago, or was it dying now, right this second? When a whale dies, it falls down through the ocean slowly, over the course of a day. All the other fish see it fall, like a giant statue, like a building, but slowly, slowly. — Miranda July

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

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

She never inquired, but she never recoiled, either. This is a quality that I look for in a person, not recoiling. — Miranda July

A more normal, mature way to think about it [my work] would be, Oh, I work on multiple projects at once and they overlap, but the actual psychology of it is a lot more self-abusing. — Miranda July

I steeled myself against laughter; I would rather die than laugh. I didn’t laugh, I did not laugh. But I died, I did die. — Miranda July

The word God asks a question and then answers it before there is any chance to wonder. — Miranda July

I went to the bedroom and lay on the floor, so as not to mess up the covers. — Miranda July

I'm totally not kidding. Life is too short. This is all too hard to do to actually be kidding about the whole thing. — Miranda July

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

When you're trying to create something and you need to hang out, in not knowing, in all the cracks and spaces where you feel lost, and you need to endure them, and have new ideas come out of that emptiness, well, the Internet is what we do when we feel lost, you know? Like, you go online or you check your email when you don't know what to do next, and so it's not helpful, in that sense. — Miranda July

I really did not feel okay about any of this, and there was really nothing I could do about any of it. — Miranda July

We were always getting away with something, which implied that someone was always watching us, which meant that we were not alone in this world. — Miranda July

To do someone else's script? I don't think I'd have a reason. — Miranda July

We don't really believe in mowing the lawn; we do it only to avoid unnecessary engagement with the neighbors. — Miranda July

Where do we come from? Do souls really exist? I can't answer these questions, especially not at 6am. — Miranda July

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

The whole thing of working in all these different mediums, it's just so that I can always be playing hooky from one of them. I can always be rebelling against my boss. Like, I'm supposed to be writing this book, but - heh heh heh - I'm writing a movie, secretly. I'm procrastinating, and in my off-hours I'm working on this movie that I'm not allowed to do, because I'm supposed to be writing a book! — Miranda July

… it wasn’t pretend, I wasn’t in a fairytale or a fable. I shut my eyes and absorbed the silent whoomp that always accompanies this revelation. It’s the sound of the real world, gigantic and impossible, replacing the smaller version of reality that I wear like a bonnet, clutched tightly under my chin. — Miranda July

I'm always the kind of friend or girlfriend who suggests, when there's some cataclysmic problem in the relationship, I'm like, "Well, maybe we can come up with a creative activity that will help us out." I'm like, "Let's get out the pens! Draw a picture of how much you hate me!" — Miranda July

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

It was a tiny sound but it woke me up because it was a human sound. — Miranda July

I wrestle my fears with every big decision I make. Ultimately, maybe all that wrestling does is make you sick of your own thoughts, and so with nothing resolved you just go ahead and have unprotected sex. The moment I became pregnant, everything became out of gait. None of those fears seem relevant in the same way, and that's so like life, that once you do the daring move you're in a totally different landscape. Now it's a new story. — Miranda July

All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it. — Miranda July

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

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

As a woman filmmaker it's pretty important that you have some basis of confidence that you're coming from, because, as I got closer to LA, there's less and less women. There's less and less mirrors for who you are. — Miranda July

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

I am very sincere. Some people are always kidding, so when you're not, it's going to seem annoying to them. — Miranda July

The job of the artist is to point at things. — Miranda July

I think it's more interesting if you go all the way with the world you have, and really look at it, and push it to an even more extreme extreme. — Miranda July

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

I'm always just trying to get the work done so that I can be free - like, with the sense that, like, the real me has no interest in this? I just gotta do it for my boss. But the catch is that I'm never free, I never finish the work, so I don't know who this freewheeling employee with extracurricular interests is. — Miranda July

I mean obviously we're all dealing with a lot more strangers due to the web. I'd say it has more to do with the quality of interactions. When you're physically interacting with someone, it forces you to be more present and probably a little more uncomfortable. You have to tolerate being outside the comfort of your own home. — Miranda July

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

I gave you things I wasn't sure I even had. — Miranda July

Would she understand that time had stopped while she was gone. — Miranda July

I supposed this was one reason why people got married, to make a fiction that was tellable. It wasn’t just movies that couldn’t contain the full cast of characters — it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew where to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing. But together or alone, we were still embedded in a kaleidoscope, ruthlessly varied and continuous, until the end of the end. — Miranda July

He pulled away, but his eyes held my eyes like hands. — Miranda July

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

She bludgeoned me with a look of such limitless compassion that I immediately began to cry. — Miranda July

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

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

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

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

I made some shorts that I'm not in. I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me. But my way into making movies has been through performing. My very first short film, I played a child and her own mother. So in some ways, to me, my great achievement so far is just that I've gotten all these other people to play the other parts. That's what makes it a real movie. — Miranda July

I think there's something spiritual in a very day-to-day, mundane existence. It's impossible to articulate, and it's happening now, almost like a perverse secret. . . . That's always sort of fascinating to me. — Miranda July

I guess like any writer or screenwriter I'm alone in my own world so much of the time that I'm often trying to force myself out of my world. Into more risk. A less controlled kind of inspiration. I'm so keenly aware of how easy it's getting to not leave the house, with Amazon, especially. — Miranda July

In the weeks that followed, we amazed ourselves. Our habits slid apart easily...And our very few intimacies were simply discontinued. Where did they go, those things we did? Were they recycled? Did some new couple in China do them? Were a Swedish man and woman foot to foot at this very moment? — Miranda July

I don't tally the world, asking, "Would this annoy you? Would this annoy you?" That's so far removed from where I'm at when I'm in the trenches struggling with how to express things that I don't fully understand myself. — Miranda July

There's always the sense that you should strike while the iron's hot and while there are all these opportunities, but that's not the way I get ideas. It has to be more organic, building up through living and through experiencing things. — Miranda July

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

And why had Deb's last boyfriend dumped her? I dumped him. Maybe you didn't French-kiss him enough. I promise you that wasn't it. Tell me how many times a day you kissed, and I'll say if it was enough. Four hundred. Not enough. — Miranda July

LA isn’t a walking city, or a subway city, so if someone isn’t in my house or my car we’ll never be together, not even for a moment. And just to be absolutely sure of that, when I leave my car my iPhone escorts me, letting everyone else in the post office know that I’m not really with them, I’m with my own people, who are so hilarious that I can’t help smiling to myself as I text them back. — Miranda July

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

He seemed to be waiting for me to move forward. Weren't we all. — Miranda July

Life Lessons by Miranda July

1. Miranda July's work emphasizes the importance of self-expression and creative exploration. She encourages viewers to think outside the box and to take risks in order to find their own unique voice.
2. July also highlights the value of meaningful connections and relationships, showing how they can lead to greater understanding and empathy.
3. Finally, July's work serves as a reminder that life is full of unexpected moments and surprises, and that it is important to be open to them and to embrace the unknown.