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 JulyRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the complexities of love and the human tendency to flee from emotional vulnerability.
Miranda July's quote delves into the complexities of love and relationships, highlighting how individuals often find themselves in love with those who are unattainable or unsuitable, leading them to marry others in an attempt to forget their impossible loves. It also touches on the fleeting nature of connection, suggesting that sometimes we reach out for intimacy or recognition in the vastness of life, only to withdraw before we receive a response, thus missing out on deeper connections.
Themes
LoveRelationshipsVulnerabilityConnectionEmotions
In practice
Example use cases
This quote is perfect for discussions on the complexities of love during a relationship seminar.
More from Miranda July
All quotes →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 JulyRead
I have female friends who work in all different mediums who I speak to at least once a week. It helps me so much to know that I'm not alone. I think that's the bare minimum you need to sustain yourself - some sort of context of other women making things.
Miranda JulyRead
After I had my son I looked everywhere for a book that might serve as some kind of mirror. I bought so many silly books. Now I see what the problem was: I wanted a book about time-about mortality. I can't think of a writer who is at once so experimentally daring and so rigorously uncompromising as Sarah Manguso. Ongoingness is an incredibly elegant, wise book, and I loved it.
Miranda JulyRead
Long before I started to write in earnest, Lorrie Moore taught me you could have a woman narrator who was funny and complex and even wrongheaded. She opened up a lot of space that me and a million other women rushed into.
Miranda JulyRead
Similar quotes
I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another’s differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility. Not this “In order to love you, I must make you something else”. That’s what domination is all about, that in order to be close to you, I must possess you, remake and recast you.
Bell HooksRead
Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul.
Martin Luther King, Jr.Read
When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or sorrow, it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand.
Henry MillerRead
I've got to stop getting obsessed with human beings and fall in love with a chair. Chairs have everything human beings have to offer, and less, which is obviously what I need. Less emotional feedback, less warmth, less approval, less patience and less response. The less the merrier. Chairs it is. I must furnish my heart with feelings for furniture.
Carrie FisherRead
You know what they say: A woman needs a man about as much as a fish needs a bicycle.
Candace BushnellRead
To me, the thing that is worse than death is betrayal. You see, I could conceive death, but I could not conceive betrayal.
Malcolm XRead