“If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“Then I realized 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, quote from The First Bad Man
“Sometimes I looked at her sleeping face, the living flesh of it, and was overwhelmed by how precarious it was to love a living thing. She could die simply from lack of water. It hardly seemed safer than falling in love with a plant.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“When you live alone people are always thinking they can stay with you, when the opposite is true: who they should stay with is a person whose situation is already messed up by other people and so one more won’t matter.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“We had fallen in love; that was still true. But given the right psychological conditions, a person could fall in love with anyone or anything. A wooden desk—always on all fours, always prone, always there for you. What was the lifespan of these improbable loves? An hour. A week. A few months at best. The end was a natural thing, like the seasons, like getting older, fruit turning. That was the saddest part—there was no one to blame and no way to reverse it.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“Try not to base your decision on this room, it isn’t representative of the whole world. Somewhere the sun is hot on a rubbery leaf, clouds are making shapes and reshaping and reshaping, a spiderweb is broken but still works.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“Maybe he wouldn't say anything, which is the worst thing men do.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“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, quote from The First Bad Man
“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, quote from The First Bad Man
“What was the lifespan of these improbable loves? An hour. A week. A few months at best. The end was a natural thing, like the seasons, like getting older, fruit turning. That was the saddest part—there was no one to blame and no way to reverse”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“I was wondering if my life, the life in which I had a son and a beautiful, young girlfriend, could exist outside of the hospital. Or was the hospital its container? Was I like honey thinking it's a small bear, not realizing the bear is just the shape of its bottle?”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“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, quote from The First Bad Man
“But as the sun rose I crested the mountain of my self-pity and remembered I was always going to die at the end of this life anyway. What did it really matter if I spent it like this—caring for this boy—as opposed to some other way? I would always be earthbound; he hadn’t robbed me of my ability to fly or to live forever. I appreciated nuns now, not the conscripted kind, but modern women who chose it. If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have? These exotic revelations bubbled up involuntarily and I began to understand that the sleeplessness and vigilance and constant feedings were a form of brainwashing, a process by which my old self was being molded, slowly but with a steady force, into a new shape: a mother. It hurt. I tried to be conscious while it happened, like watching my own surgery. I hoped to retain a tiny corner of the old me, just enough to warn other women with. But I knew this was unlikely; when the process was complete I wouldn’t have anything left to complain with, it wouldn’t hurt anymore, I wouldn’t remember.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“Like a rich person, I live with a full-time servant who keeps everything in order—and because the servant is me, there’s no invasion of privacy.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“My eyes fell on the gray linoleum floor and I wondered how many other women had sat on this toilet and stared at this floor. Each of them the center of their own world, all of them yearning for someone to put their love into so they could see their love, see that they had it.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“I would always be earthbound; he hadn’t robbed me of my ability to fly or to live forever. I appreciated nuns now, not the conscripted kind, but modern women who chose it. If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“Finally, in a low whisper, he said, ‘I think I might be a terrible person.’ For a split second I believed him - I thought he was about to confess a crime, maybe a murder. Then I realized that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before asking someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“Every night my plan was to make it to dawn and then feel out the options. But that was just it -- there were no options. There had been options, before the baby, but none of them had been pursued. I had not flown to Japan by myself to see what it was like there. I had not gone to nightclubs and said Tell me everything about yourself to strangers. I had not even gone to the movies by myself. I had been quiet when there was no reason to be quiet and consistent when consistency didn't matter. For the last twenty years I had lived as if I was taking care of a newborn baby.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“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.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“Oh, the future. I see.” A shadow fell over the doctor’s face. “You’re wondering if your son will get cancer? Or be hit by a car? Or be bipolar? Or have autism? Or drug problems? I don’t know, I’m not a psychic. Welcome to parenthood.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“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, quote from The First Bad Man
“The usual treatment is psychotherapy.” “I know.” I didn’t explain that I was single. Therapy is for couples. So is Christmas. So is camping. So is beach camping.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“Was I like honey thinking it’s a small bear, not realizing the bear is just the shape of its bottle?”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“Did she think it was temporary? Or maybe that was the point of love: not to think.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“I wouldn’t use a British accent out loud, but I’d be using one in my head and it would carry over.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“A howl was curdling inside me; the ache felt inhuman. Or maybe this was my first human feeling.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“I drove to the doctor's office as if I was starring in a movie Phillip was watching -- windows down, hair blowing, just one hand on the wheel. When I stopped at red lights, I kept my eyes mysteriously forward. Who is she? people might have been wondering. Who is that middle-aged woman in the blue Honda?”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“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, quote from The First Bad Man
“Then one night I woke at three A.M. certain he was rotting like a chicken carcass. Only as I lowered him into the sink did I realize this was a crazy time to wash a baby and I began to cry because he was so trusting—I could do anything and he would go along with it, the little fool.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
Miranda July
Born place: in Barre, Vermont, The United States
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“From the very first, I knew that it would be so...I smiled to myself, and said, "That -- and none other.”
― Daphne du Maurier, quote from Frenchman's Creek
“Good God. I don’t believe St. Vincent and the word ‘celibacy’ have ever been mentioned in the same sentence before.”
― Lisa Kleypas, quote from Devil in Winter
“In every remote corner of the world there are people like Carl Jones and Don Merton who have devoted their lives to saving threatened species. Very often, their determination is all that stands between an endangered species and extinction.
But why do they bother? Does it really matter if the Yangtze river dolphin, or the kakapo, or the northern white rhino, or any other species live on only in scientists' notebooks?
Well, yes, it does. Every animal and plant is an integral part of its environment: even Komodo dragons have a major role to play in maintaining the ecological stability of their delicate island homes. If they disappear, so could many other species. And conservation is very much in tune with our survival. Animals and plants provide us with life-saving drugs and food, they pollinate crops and provide important ingredients or many industrial processes. Ironically, it is often not the big and beautiful creatures, but the ugly and less dramatic ones, that we need most.
Even so, the loss of a few species may seem irrelevant compared to major environmental problems such as global warming or the destruction of the ozone layer. But while nature has considerable resilience, there is a limit to how far that resilience can be stretched. No one knows how close to the limit we are getting. The darker it gets, the faster we're driving.
There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary. It is certainly the reason why so many people have devoted their lives to protecting the likes of rhinos, parakeets, kakapos, and dolphins. And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Last Chance to See
“It's what's buried deep inside that frightens me because it's broken, like a shattered mirror.”
― Jessica Sorensen, quote from The Secret of Ella and Micha
“The pleasures arising from thinking and learning will make us think and learn all the more. 1153a 23”
― Aristotle, quote from The Nicomachean Ethics
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Madness: A Bipolar L...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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