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9fc2d82
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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.
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sad
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Miranda July |
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0549521
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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.
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Miranda July |
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26698df
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I looked at other couples and wondered how they could be so calm about it. They held hands as if they weren't even holding hands. When Steve and I held hands, I had to keep looking down to marvel at it. There was my hand, the same hand I've always had - oh, but look! What is it holding? It's holding Steve's hand! Who is Steve? My three-dimensional boyfriend. Each day I wondered what would happen next. What happens when you stop wanting, whe..
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Miranda July |
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4563b1c
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He seemed to be waiting for me to move forward. Weren't we all.
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Miranda July |
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d1360ac
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Some may say that such a girl is not ready for a relationship with a man, especially a man in his late sixties. But to that I say: We don't know anything. We don't know how to cure a cold or what dogs are thinking. We do terrible things, we make wars, we kill people out of greed. So who are we to say how to love. I wouldn't force her. I wouldn't have to. She would want me. We would be in love. What do you know. You don't know anything. Call..
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Miranda July |
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662e6b5
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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")."
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love
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Miranda July |
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0323c03
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He pulled away, but his eyes held my eyes like hands.
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Miranda July |
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e927d72
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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?
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Miranda July |
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11c10b5
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There was nothing in this world that was not a con, suddenly I understood this. Nothing really mattered, and nothing could be lost.
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Miranda July |
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f66680c
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When you can see the beauty of a tree, then you will know what love is.
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Miranda July |
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2bcd305
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She never inquired, but she never recoiled, either. This is a quality that I look for in a person, not recoiling.
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Miranda July |
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bcb1f6d
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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.
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Miranda July |
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335b762
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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.
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lovers
love-hurts
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Miranda July |
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85a0438
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I really did not feel okay about any of this, and there was really nothing I could do about any of it.
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Miranda July |
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87df504
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If you are sad, ask yourself why you are sad. Then pick up the phone and call someone and tell him the answer to the question. If you don't know anyone, call the operator and tell him. Most people don't know that the operator has to listen, it is a law. Also, the postman is not allowed to go inside your house, but you can talk to him on public property for up to four minutes or until he wants to go, whichever comes first.
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Miranda July |
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c0b4e6d
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Live the dream, Potato.
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Miranda July |
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0dca9ce
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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.
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Miranda July |
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9b4aabc
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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.
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Miranda July |
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b1e5ee8
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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.
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Miranda July |
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8aaa356
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Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy to hope for something else.
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Miranda July |
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43294f6
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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.
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Miranda July |
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cc52152
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We were excited about getting jobs; we hardly went anywhere without filling out an application. But once we were hired - as furniture sanders - we could not believe this was really what people did all day. Everything we had thought of as The World was actually the result of someone's job. Each line on the sidewalk, each saltine. Everyone had a rotting carpet and a door to pay for. Aghast, we quit. There had to be a more dignified way to liv..
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Miranda July |
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642d291
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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.
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Miranda July |
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c604b49
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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.
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Miranda July |
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65219dc
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I could not make a move without making love.
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Miranda July |
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3a17bd9
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She bludgeoned me with a look of such limitless compassion that I immediately began to cry.
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Miranda July |
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629cf11
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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?
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love
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Miranda July |
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e964ce6
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Would she understand that time had stopped while she was gone.
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Miranda July |
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19c59c4
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It wasn't good, he wasn't good, he did not have good intentions. I stood there, and he stood there. He breathed out the bitter air that makes women doubt everything, and I breathed it in, as I had always done.
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Miranda July |
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3f43028
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It occurred to me that everyone's story matters to themselves, so the more I listened, the more she wanted to talk.
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Miranda July |
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18d5602
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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.
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Miranda July |
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f4999d1
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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.
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Miranda July |
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125cbd7
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I went to the bedroom and lay on the floor, so as not to mess up the covers.
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Miranda July |
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a3fb297
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Now began the part of her life where she was just very beautiful, except for nothing. Only winners will know what this feels like. Have you ever wanted something very badly and then gotten it? Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be.
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Miranda July |
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2a82574
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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.
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Miranda July |
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b2674ed
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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.
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Miranda July |
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16ccb15
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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.
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Miranda July |
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a9860b6
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we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.
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Miranda July |
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e55ce70
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People are always breaking through, like in the Doors song 'Break on Through (To the Other Side)'. But I really had. I had broken through twice now, and my feeling about the universe was that it was porous and radical and you could turn it on, you could even fuck around with the universe.
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Miranda July |
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891953b
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The funny thing about my procrastination was that I was almost done with the screenplay. I was like a person who had fought dragons and lost limbs and crawled through swamps and now, finally, the castle was visible. I could see tiny children waving flags on the balcony; all I had to do was walk across a field to get to them. But all of a sudden I was very, very sleepy. And the children couldn't believe their eyes as I folded down to my knee..
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procrastination
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Miranda July |
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f61b067
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We don't really believe in mowing the lawn; we do it only to avoid unnecessary engagement with the neighbors.
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Miranda July |
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08db566
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In the recurring dream everything has already fallen down, and I'm underneath. I'm crawling, sometimes for days, under the rubble. And as I crawl I realize that this one was the Big One. It was the earthquake that shook the whole world, and every single thing was destroyed. But this isn't the scary part. That part always comes right before I wake up. I am crawling and then suddenly I remember: the earthquake happened years ago. This pain, t..
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life
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Miranda July |
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d4aa5c0
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We were always getting away with something, which implied that someone was always watching us, which mean were are not alone in this world.
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Miranda July |
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ea315ec
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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..
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Miranda July |