No One Belongs Here More Than You - Miranda July

Last updated May 5, 2024

• Author: Miranda July
• Full Title: No One Belongs Here More Than You
• Category: #books

People tend to stick to their own size group because it’s easier on the neck. Unless they are romantically involved, in which case the size difference is sexy. It means: I am willing to go the distance for you. (Location 86)

Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone. (Location 109)

He was a complex person with layers of percolating emotions, some of them spiritual, some tortured in a more secular way, and he burned for me. (Location 142)

They seem easy to write, but that’s the illusion of all good advice. Common sense and the truth should feel authorless, writ by time itself. (Location 178)

Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is 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. (Location 182)

And in time I realized that if the truth felt empty, then I probably would not be your girlfriend much longer. (Location 189)

I admitted these were not perfect conditions for learning to swim, but, I pointed out, this was how Olympic swimmers trained when there wasn’t a pool nearby. Yes yes yes, this was a lie, but we needed it because we were four people lying on the kitchen floor, kicking it loudly as if angry, as if furious, as if disappointed and frustrated and not afraid to show it. The connection to swimming had to be enforced with strong words. (Location 220)

It was just two hours a week, but all the other hours were in support of those two. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings, I’d wake up and think: Swim Practice. On the other mornings, I’d wake up and think: No Swim Practice. (Location 240)

It’s been three hours since I ran into you at the bookstore with the woman in the white coat. What a fabulous white coat. You are obviously completely happy and fulfilled already, even though we only broke up two weeks ago. I wasn’t even totally sure we were broken up until I saw you with her. You seem incredibly faraway to me, like someone on the other side of a lake. A dot so small that it isn’t male or female or young or old; it is just smiling. (Location 246)

If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his. You would die getting to him. You could only hope that your grandchildren’s children would get to him. (Location 256)

That day I carried the dream around like a full glass of water, moving gracefully so I would not lose any of it. (Location 277)

I looked at the boy; he was looking at me as if we had already agreed on something. Just by standing beside him for a minute too long, I had somehow propositioned him. I couldn’t leave him without some kind of negotiation. (Location 368)

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 to hope for something else. (Location 374)

He seemed to have all the time in the world for this, my God, did he have time. I have never taken such care with anything. That is my problem with life, I rush through it, like I’m being chased. (Location 382)

The boy used the squeegee with a kind precision that made you know this job was not simply within his field of interest, this was exactly it, this was all he had ever wanted. La. (Location 412)

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. (Location 477)

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. (Location 564)

Math teachers are saying that math was just a funny way of saying “I love you.” But now they are simply saying it, I love you, (Location 572)

This person plunges underwater and moves her hair around like a sea anemone. This person can stay underwater for an impressively long time but only in a bathtub. (Location 593)

This person mourns the fact that she has ruined her one chance to be loved by everyone; as this person climbs into bed, the weight of this tragedy seems to bear down upon this person’s chest. And it is a comforting weight, almost human in heft. (Location 596)

Her face and permed hair were forgotten; there was just the voice and the white light, and these two things combined felt like the truth. (Location 602)

But we have all been there. Chairs are for people, and you’re not sure if you are one. (Location 634)

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. (Location 644)

Then I sat on her porch and pretended I was twelve or fifteen or even sixteen. At all these ages, I had dreamed of today; I had even imagined sitting here, waiting for Pip for the last time. (Location 659)

My mind ballooned with nervous fear. I looked at Pip and 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. (Location 689)

Sometimes she did this. In the moments when other couples would fight or come together, she left me. With one foot in the bath, I stood waiting for her to return. I waited an unreasonably long time, long enough to realize that she wouldn’t be back tonight. But what if I waited it out, what if I stood here naked until she returned? And then, just as she walked in the front door, I could finish the gesture, squatting in the then-cold water. (Location 708)

When she told me about it, I cried and she hit me on the chin and I curled up in a ball for forty minutes until she uncurled me. I kept my eyes shut as she pulled my knees away from my chest and I could feel her looking at my body and I knew that if I kept my eyes closed it would happen and it did. (Location 738)

Traditionally, parents did not know what to make of Pip, who looked much more like a boy than a girl, and somehow made mothers feel flirtatious and fathers feel strangely threatened. (Location 752)

We practiced a very loose, sporadic form of class warfare that sanctioned every kind of thievery. There was no person, no business, no library, hospital, or park that had not stolen from us, be it psychically or historically, and thus we were forever trying to regain what was ours. (Location 785)

We were always getting away with something, which implied that someone was always watching us, which meant we were not alone in this world. (Location 790)

Before they pulled away, I shut my eyes and hurled myself onto the sidewalk. I lay there. This was my last hope— that Pip would take pity on me. I heard their car idling. I listened to the traffic and the sound of pedestrians walking carefully around me. I could almost hear Kate and Pip arguing in the car, Pip wanting to get out and help me, Kate urging them to leave. I pressed my cheek against the pavement in prayer. High heels clicked toward me and stopped; an elderly woman’s voice asked if I was okay. I whispered that I was fine and silently begged her to move on. But the woman was persistent, so finally I opened my eyes to tell her to go. Kate’s car was gone. (Location 817)

In dreams I knew I was tunneling toward her— if I could only dig deep enough, I would find her. The tunnels narrowed as I crawled through them, until they became impossibly knotted strands of hair that I could only tear at. (Location 824)

I walked. It was an incredible distance. A horse would get tired galloping there. When birds flew there, it was called migration. But it wasn’t difficult, it just took time. (Location 842)

I was in a unique situation where I needed to give a Live Fantasy Show in order to protect my personal safety. (Location 865)

At five A.M. I was gliding through the night on a bus. The bus was just a formality, though— actually I was flying, in the air, (Location 892)

I hated my job, but I liked that I could do it. I had once believed in a precious inner self, but now I didn’t. I had thought that I was fragile, but I wasn’t. It was like suddenly being good at sports. (Location 897)

Now that I know, it seems so obvious. Suddenly, there is nothing I remember that doesn’t contain a clue. (Location 971)

It is as if she came up from hell to make this one thing, a record, and then she went back. But who am I to say. Maybe it wasn’t hell. Maybe she really wanted to go back. (Location 1014)

I do not play the accordion or have bunk beds, but I have these pillows. They move by themselves. (Location 1072)

I took off my shoes and got under the covers. I whispered, Shut your eyes, and I shut my eyes and pretended it was night and that the world was all around me, sleeping. I told myself that the sound of my breathing was really the sound of all the animals in the world breathing, even the humans, even the boy, even his dog, all together, all breathing, all on Earth, at night. (Location 1079)

When you reach a certain saturation point, lovemaking becomes one endless vibration. (Location 1108)

All of the darkness was inside me, and I could feel it glowing, like the volume of music when it shows you how to move. (Location 1135)

To look down on my own body and know that falling would mean dying not just once but many times. To fall for a million years like a flute falls, musically, played by the air it is passing through. And to land with no mind, but with a heart that was breaking. (Location 1142)

I fell into the eyes of every person I passed on the street. Food seemed impossibly strange. Children thought I was a child and tried to play with me, but I could neither play nor work, I could only wonder why. (Location 1199)

I kissed the backs of his legs and they sang. He reached around and pulled me down onto his back and I lay there, like on the warm sand of a beach. Just that. That is all there is. That is the whole point of everything. (Location 1285)

This morning I woke up to the sound of the neighbor trimming his tree. I told myself he would stop trimming only if I got out of bed. The tree got smaller and smaller. Soon it was just a stump, and he had to go underground and start trimming the roots, and still I couldn’t get up. The roots were gone and he was sawing through the earth and I told myself that when he came out in China, I would get up. It took him all day. (Location 1318)

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. (Location 1374)

I went home early to study my apartment before the class. I wanted to look at everything through her eyes. I do this before I bring someone new into my life; I try to get a sense of who I am so that I can make it easier for them to know me. (Location 1379)

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. (Location 1407)

I made orange juice from concentrate and showed her the trick of squeezing the juice of one real orange into it. It removes the taste of being frozen. She marveled at this, and I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again. (Location 1408)

The day felt like a birthday, our first, and we ourselves were the gifts, to be opened again and again. (Location 1410)

We wanted to strike lightning in dark waters, to see, if only for a second, the entire world that lives down there, the ten million species in amazing colors and patterns; show us life, now. (Location 1415)

Suddenly, it was very late, and from where I was sitting, I could see the dust starting to reunite on the TV. I would probably never dust the TV again; I wouldn’t have a reason to. This made me feel so violently sad that I got a cloth and began dusting it right then and there, (Location 1422)

I looked at his sleeve as if it were his face. It had not occurred to me that it would get this bad, that indignity would dance upon bloodshed. (Location 1443)

There was a softness in the air from all the flannel; it seemed to muffle the chill of the Adult Education Center. (Location 1451)

Then Sue suddenly stepped out of the bathroom holding her robe in one hand, naked. She had discovered she couldn’t put it on because it wasn’t really a robe, it was nothing. All the women paused and fell silent, and Ellen and I quickly looked at each other. Our nakedness was recalled, like a seizure in the air. There was no apology in her eyes, no love or caring. But she saw me, I existed, and this lifted the beams off my shoulders. It takes so little. Sue boldly walked across the room and planted her wad of flannel in the middle of the floor like a pink hive or a giant tulip bulb. All the women gathered around it like fire, like fire we knew better than to touch it, but we could not look away. (Location 1454)

he repeated skinning on my palm with his dry fingers. It felt like a hand massage. He was incredibly confident. I could not imagine using these movements alone, with such confidence. You’re going to make some woman very, very happy, he said. (Location 1465)

Don’t wait to be sure or you’ll miss the boat, hop on and move, move, move. (Location 1472)

You could let it grow another inch and then come back and I’ll give you a bob. That way everyone wins. No, I have to do it today. It’s the first day of the rest of my life. Oh. I had a day like that last week. Really? What happened? I woke up and thought, This is the first day of the rest of my life. Then what happened? I drove to work. Oh. Yeah. Let’s give that kid some new hair. (Location 1479)

I lie there beside him and try to send signals to my vagina, but it’s like trying to get cable channels on a TV that doesn’t have cable. My mind requests sex, but my vagina is just waiting for the next time it has to pee. It thinks its whole job in life is to pee. (Location 1495)

People love to make life harder than it has to be. (Location 1523)

Carl even interrupted me, mouthing and nodding in agreement with what I was saying, presumably taking it one step further, and I just knew, knowing the way that people talk when they are happy, that he had said something funny. I laughed soundlessly and Carl smiled, a real smile, so pleased was he to have made me laugh. And it was so tremendous to see that smile, I could feel myself glowing, I somehow felt beautiful, and cut. (Location 1663)

We could not look away from each other, every inhalation was a question: Yes? Followed by: Yes. Falling and catching and falling and catching, we descended into a precarious and vivid place; I had always known it was there but had never guessed where. (Location 1674)

Carl’s new sense of humor flourished in silence, he made subtly absurd gestures that surprised me into almost audible laughter. And I could not make a move without making love. Every time I shifted in my chair, lifted my fork, brushed my hair from my eyes, I seemed to be pushing through the motions as through honey, slowly and with all kinds of implications. I feared our breath was too loud. I seized his forearms, he took off his shoes, beneath the table, our feet pushed with an almost vocal eloquence. (Location 1675)

as the illusion of prettiness and horribleness flipped back and forth, we flipped with it. We were uglier than her, then suddenly we were lucky not to be her, but then again, at this angle she was too lovely to bear. She was both, we were both, and the world continued to spin. (Location 1714)

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. (Location 1717)

It was the birthmark, which in its density had lent color even to her voice. She didn’t miss the birthmark, but she missed her Norwegian heritage, like learning of new relatives, only to discover they have just died. (Location 1728)

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. Years went by. This thing grew, like a child, microscopically, every day. And since they were a team, and all teams want to win, they continuously adjusted their vision to keep its growth invisible. They wordlessly excused each other for not loving each other as much as they had planned to. (Location 1741)

She came out of the trance like a plane taking off. Instead of being inside the stain, she was now looking down on it from above. Like a lake, it grew smaller and smaller until it was only a tiny region in a larger mass. One that this pilot favored, hovered over, but would not touch down on again. (Location 1766)

He found himself kneeling. He was waiting for her on his knees. He was worried she would not let him love her with the stain. He had already decided long ago, twenty or thirty minutes ago, that the stain was fine. He had only seen it for a moment, but he was already used to it. It was good. It somehow allowed them to have more. They could have a child now, he thought. There was a loose feeling in the air. The jam was still on the floor, and that was okay. He would just kneel here and wait for her to come out and hope he would be able to tell her about the looseness in a loose way. He wanted to keep the feeling. (Location 1769)

Tom began screaming, and I wondered if the baby’s soft brain was, in this moment, changing shape in response to the violent stimuli. (Location 1806)

She jumped out of the pool and ran toward her mother on the lounger. She shrieked, now in a drunken imitation of laughter, and hurled herself onto Sarah. (Location 1844)

After the movie, we came home and took a bath in my tub, also known as La Salon Paree. We made potions out of combinations of shampoos and tested them on each other’s backs for scent, froth, and beautification properties. We checked Lyon’s body for signs of puberty, which never appeared. (Or yes, they did, but years after the close of La Salon Paree.) We slept together in my giant bed that was exactly as wide as it was long. It made as much sense to sleep in one direction as another, and Lyon charted our course by spinning around, Tonight weee willlll sleeeeeep, and then flinging herself down, this way! She lay still, holding the spot, while I moved the pillows around to our new north. (Location 1861)

How to Tell Stories to Children, and Some Stories to Tell. (Location 1866)

And then we slept. Spooning at first, and then, because Lyon radiated an uncomfortable heat, back to back. (Location 1868)

Lyon held my hand, and Tom asked if I wanted to talk about my feelings. I looked at him and his child, and for a fraction of a second, I could see the spell that bound me, like a spider thread catching the light. Cast upon me long ago, at an age when I longed to be ensnared, it now spanned generations. (Location 1924)

Lyon’s acute allergies had gone away. When Lyon’s eyes and skin did become red and inflamed, Sarah was prone to saying things like, Is this your way of seeking attention? Allergies? That’s the best you can do? Ed taught Lyon to say, Mom, I need you to take care of me, and he taught Sarah to respond without yelling. (Location 1929)

Before we did anything, Ed asked if he had permission to cry, and I said, Permission granted, and he settled his face between my breasts and moaned. When he was done, I noticed that his face wasn’t wet. That’s because I cry dry tears. Oh. Is that an actual term? Dry tears? Well, I have a theory that men don’t actually cry less than women, they just do it differently. Since we never saw our fathers cry, we are each forced to invent our own unique method. (Location 1964)

I quit PFLAG and moved through the next few days in weepy wonderment. I knew nothing about her. It was really over and I really was not her mother. I was really almost fifty. I really did not feel okay about any of this, and there was really nothing I could do about it. Somehow losing the lesbianism, the butch girlfriend, the need for tolerance, was worse than losing Lyon herself, years before. Or, more likely, I was still feeling the old loss, just in a new way. (Location 2008)

We ate quietly, those of us who knew Ed and those of us who only knew there was a funny feeling in the room. (Location 2021)

Ed placed his hand over Lyon’s hand; we all looked from Ed to Tom. Tom looked at Lyon; we all did. She was staring intently at Sarah, who slowly looked up from her plate and at her daughter. And then, casually, Lyon slipped her hand out from beneath Ed’s and passed me the potatoes, though I had not asked for the potatoes. I took the dish and she did not release the dish and we held the dish together for a moment, it hovered over her parents’ dinner table. My eyes ventured slowly from the dish, to the front of her blouse, to her eyes. What did I fear I would find there? Meanness and gloating? Slyness? Shame? They were sparkling with the old love, the greatest love of my lifetime. And they were triumphant. (Location 2024)

Her work has been presented at sites such as The Kitchen, the Guggenheim Museum, and two Whitney Biennials. (Location 2209)

Her short fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Harper’s, Zoetrope, McSweeney’s, and The New Yorker. (Location 2211)