Riiah > Riiah's Quotes

“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, The First Bad Man

“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, 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 something else.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“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, It Chooses You

“Your sentimentality softens all the edges, you’re misremembering. Take a moment to recall it as it really was: fucking hell.”
― Miranda July

“Someone is getting excited. Somebody somewhere is shaking with excitement because something tremendous is about to happen to this person. This person has dressed for the occasion. This person has hoped and dreamed and now it is really happening and this person can hardly believe it. But believing is not an issue here, the time for faith and fantasy is over, it is really really happening. It involves stepping forward and bowing. Possibly there is some kneeling, such as when one is knighted. One is almost never knighted. But this person may kneel and receive a tap on each shoulder with a sword. Or, more likely, this person will be in a car or a store or under a vinyl canopy when it happens. Or online or on the phone. It could be an e-mail re: your knighthood. Or a long, laughing, rambling phone message in which every person this person has ever known is talking on a speakerphone and they are all saying, You have passed the test, it was all just a test, we were only kidding, real life is so much better than that. This person is laughing out loud with relief and playing the message back to get the address of the place where every person this person has ever known is waiting to hug this person and bring her into the fold of life. It is really exciting, and it’s not just a dream, it’s real.”
― Miranda July

“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, The First Bad Man

“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, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“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.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it's worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“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 July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“But, like ivy, we grow where there is room for us.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“i wondered if i would spend the rest of my life inventing complicated ways to depress myself..”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“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.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“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

“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.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“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, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“He pulled away, but his eyes held my eyes like hands.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“You can love someone so much...But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.”
― John Green

“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”
― François Rabelais

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“I would die for you. But I won't live for you.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Sometimes people use thought to not participate in life.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word—all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma