Miranda July Quotes

I don't need to manufacture trauma in my life to be creative. I have a big enough reservoir of sadness or emotional trauma to last me.

People went through life like well handled jugs, collecting chips and scrapes and stains from wear and tear, from holding and pouring life.

Were all conning ourselves, one way or another, just to get through life.

Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one's garden.

Sometime you just need to be silent, have a drink and crack a smile or somethin', because the human condition, in general, is just overwhelming in so many ways.

I'm not saying that experiencing loss is why I can cope with darker worlds - I'm not saying that for a second - but I think it opens up a side of you in terms of work that wouldn't be as accessible had that stuff not happened.

My main question that I ask of my characters is, 'What does it feel like to be you? And how do you get through the day? Where do you find the hope and faith to endure getting through the days, and what are your days like?'

I think there are spirits who are just too frail for the events life throws at them. Where do these people hide, and how do they survive?

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.

Just because I'm talking about something that might have been a sad or painful situation doesn't mean that I'm sad or tortured 24 hours a day any more than anybody else is.

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.

You can't un-have an experience. You can deny the experience; you can process it and try to get through it, but you can't change the fact that it happened to you.

I think everyone in their life goes through challenges, whether it's love or money, kids or illness... You have to really not run away from that stuff.

I'd been suffering all of my life. I think comedians and artists, we do that. We know how to be the life of the party and enjoy exuberance outside of pain.

Life is full of ups and downs. One needs to stay positive in life, no matter what.

As a human being, you find a way to survive, moment by moment, every single day of your life.

Oh, God — the lives people try to lead. Oh, God — what a world they try to lead them in.

If you can learn to endure pain, you can survive anything. Some people learn to embrace it- to love it. Some endure it through drowning it in sorrow, or by making themselves forget. Others turn it into anger.

Philosophy's power to blunt all the blows of circumstance is beyond belief.

There are people who have let the problems of today lead them to conclude that for them life is not the way.

A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it.

Perhaps the greatest psychological, spiritual, and medical need that all people have is the need for hope.

Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation, seemed merely a temporary halt on my steady descent through layer after layer of depression, like an elevator stopping for a moment on the way down to the basement.

I grew up bar-singing and saw all kinds of ways people tried to outrun their emotional pain. It doesn't work. You end up with the original pain, as well as new pain added on top of it from the tactics you used trying to avoid it in the first place. It's best to take a deep breath, bolster yourself, and walk through it.

We start to realize that there are anodynes in life that help us through the day. I don't care if it's a walk in the park, a look out the window, a good bubble bath - whatever. Even a meal you like, or a friend you want to call. That helps us solve all this stuff in our head.