Miranda July All Fours Quotes

All of the hormones that made me want to seem approachable so I could breed are gone and replaced by hormones that are fiercely protective of my autonomy and freedom

It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours.

Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it.

Remember the Simone de Beauvoir quote,” she said, “ ‘You can’t have everything you want but you can want everything you want.’ 

But maybe the road split between: a life spent longing vs. a life that was continually surprising

You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new.

Life didn’t just get better and better. You could actually miss out on something and that was that. That was your chance and now it was over.

For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces- each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand. I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I turned.

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.

The women I dated were often my age, that was fine. But the men always had to be older than me because if they were my same age then it became too obvious how much more powerful I was and this was a turnoff for both of us. Men needed a head start for it to be even.

My friends are always obliging me with ephemera like this- screenshots of sexts, emails to their mothers- because I'm forever wanting to know what it feels like to be other people. What are we all doing? What the hell was going on here on Earth? Of course none of these artifacts really amounted to anything; it was like trying to grab smoke by its handle. What handle?

Nobody knows what's going on. We are thrown across our lives by winds that started blowing millions of years ago.

there’s no satisfaction in violence; it actually works in reverse, making you the bad one.

I feel such tenderness toward them. Try to remember this feeling, I say to myself. They are the same people up close as they are from here.

If birth was being thrown energetically up into the air, we aged as we rose. At the height of our ascent we were middle-aged and then we fell for the rest of our lives, the whole second half. Falling might take just as long, but it was nothing like rising. The whole time you were rising you could not imagine what came next in your particular, unique journey; you could not see around the corner. Whereas falling ended the same way for everyone.

So much of what I had thought of as femininity was really just youth.

in a patriarchy your body is technically not your own until you pass the reproductive age.

He doesn't see how each moment can be made terrible if you only try. There can be a problem every second so that life is a sort of low-grade torture.

I heard about your survey from Joslyn! As someone treated a certain way their entire adult life because they were voluptuous and pretty, it’s become a joy to be unseen. But it was a bit of a journey, letting go, and boy how I wish I could tell other women struggling with the fade of their bloom how great life is once you let go of the flower.

With a partner you had the story of how you met, choosing each other out of everyone in the world, and the years together were chaptered with joint decisions - no one could ever say it was all a dream; both parties were accountable. Not so with a child. For the child it WAS a dream. And the unpunctuated days into years moved much more quickly (for the parent), so all one could do was free-fall through the chaos, madly making sandwiches and washing hair and hope that there would be some ritual, some time for reflection, at the end.

The rest of the time we respectfully forgave each other for utterly failing to be what we felt we deserved

If there was anything meaningful about aging, it was tunneling backward in time together, holding memories as a couple so they made a kind of safe basket in a rough and arbitrary world—not just for Sam but for us.

no reason was turning out to be a major theme in life. generally speaking, when real pain was involved, there was no reason. no one to hold accountable, no apology. pain just was. it radiated with no narrative and no end.

They were growing up. As we were becoming ourselves, they were, too, and the main thing, really, was not to steal their thunder.

I was no closer to being sixty-five than twenty-five, but since time moved forward, not backward, sixty-five was tomorrow and twenty-five was moot.

A lot of women destroy their lives in their forties and then one day they wake up with no periods and no partner and only themselves to blame

I guess any calling, no mater what it is, is a kind of unresolved ache," I said, giving in to knowing more than him. "It's a problem that you can't fix, but there is some relief in knowing you will commit your whole life to trying. Every second you have is somehow for it.

The problem began right at the start, with one of us entirely inside the other, a state that seemed close but was fundamentally distant.

Safe and full of holy potential.

Each person does the amount of lying that is right for them. You have to know yourself and fulfill the amount of untruth that your constitution requires.

Back when Harris and I slept together I would often whisper, Let’s dream the same dream, right after we turned out the lights. He took it as a sweet sign-off, but I yearned for this joint dream so hard my teeth hurt. He didn’t understand that you could create a world—a fantasy, a nightmare—and bring other people into it, not just artistically but in life. I was pretty good at getting people to meet me in my mind, but ultimately no one wanted to stay there.

Harris couldn’t see the haunting and this was the worst part: to be living with someone who fundamentally didn’t believe me and was really, really sick of having to pretend to empathize—or else be the bad guy! In his own home! How infuriating for him. And how infuriating to be the wife and not other women who could enjoy how terrific he was. How painful for both of us, especially given that we were modern, creative types used to living in our dreams of the future.

Picture how the vaginal canal squeezes the water out of a baby’s lungs—it’s the shock of this squeezing and the sudden cold air that makes the baby cry out and take their first breath!” She inhaled so I inhaled, too. “The trauma itself prepares them for the next phase, life on Earth.

What you see is what you get," these women said about themselves. For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces -- each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand. I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I turned.

Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it. A latent bias, internalized by both of us, suddenly leapt forth in parenthood. It was now obvious that Harris was openly rewarded for each thing he did while I was quietly shamed for the same things. There was no way to fight back against this, no one to point a finger at, because it came from everywhere.

Was this the secret to everything? This bodily freedom? It felt intuitive and healthy, as if promiscuity was my birthright as a woman. Maybe it was. Was this the skeleton in civilization’s closet? The reason why men had come down so hard on us since the start of time?

My face reddened. It wasn’t just Audra I’d dragged through the mud; it was every woman old enough to be my mother. Including—just recently—myself.

It wasn't over. The past could come back, fully formed, at any moment, unlocked by a random combination of sounds and movements.

Every time Jordi and I met, the premise was that we had changed radically since the last meeting, and would again and again.

False modesty is one of those things that's hard to go easy on, like squirting whipped cream from a can.

I started doing several different breathing exercises at once that all canceled each other out.

This kind of desire made a wound you just had to carry with you for the rest of your life.

Are we totally sure about the domestication of animals? Will we not look back on this as a kind of slavery?

I was busy, too, but I always have time to worry.

If there was anything meaningful about aging, it was tunneling backward in time together, holding memories as a couple so they made a kind of safe basket in a rough and arbitrary world

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.

Other couples might have crossed the room toward each other and kissed, but we understood the feeling would disappear if we got too close. It’s some kind of Greek tragedy, us, but not all told.

But this was no good, this line of thought. This was the thinking that had kept every woman from her greatness. There did not have to be an answer to the question why; everything important started out mysterious and this mystery was like a great sea you had to be brave enough to cross. How many times had I turned back at the first ripple of self-doubt? You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new. So far each thing I had done in Monrovia was guided by a version of me that had never been in charge before. A nitwit? A madwoman? Probably. But my more seasoned parts just had to be patient, hold their tongues - their many and sharp tongues - and give this new girl a chance.

With a baby one could no longer be cute and coy about capitalism - money was time, time was everything. We could have skipped lightly across all this by not becoming parents; it never really had to come to a head.

I thought I was laboring toward a prize, but the prize was right there, I already had it, and work was something I could do afterward, after I was no longer young enough to be beautiful and could no longer be wanted by someone beautiful.

At the height of our ascent we were middle-aged and then we fell for the rest of our lives, the whole second half. Falling might take just as long, but it was nothing like rising. The whole time you were rising you could not imagine what came next in your particular, unique journey; you could not see around the corner. Whereas falling ended the same way for everyone.

I also don’t love getting in pools, by the way. Sunday nights! Packing for trips! Any transition. Whatever state I’m in I just want to stay in it, if that’s not too much to ask.” It was, though, for a married person. Sometimes I could hear Harris’s dick whistling impatiently like a teakettle, at higher and higher pitches until I finally couldn’t take it and so I initiated.

I stood holding the note with that funny little abandoned feeling one gets a million times a day in a domestic setting. I could have cried, but why? It’s not like I need to dish with my husband about every little thing; that’s what friends are for. Harris and I are more formal, like two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned our drink. Forever thirsty but forever wanting the other one to take the first sip.

What’s the best thing about being postmenopausal?” “Best?” “Yeah?” Maybe there was no best. “Hmm, let’s see . . . well, a woman’s mental health postmenopause is usually better than it’s been at any other time in the life of that particular woman, other than maybe childhood.” What. “Is that really true? Is it because our periods stop?” “Mm, it’s more that we aren’t cycling anymore between estrogen and progesterone and FSH. And, of course, in a patriarchy your body is technically not your own until you pass the reproductive age.” She said this offhandedly, less like feminism and more like a scientific or anthropological fact.

Sometimes I could hear Harris’s dick whistling impatiently like a teakettle, at higher and higher pitches until I finally couldn’t take it and so I initiated.

Nobody knows what’s going on. We are thrown across our lives by winds that started blowing millions of years ago.

It was the kind of climax that needed another one right after to scoop up the leftovers and then another to lick the plate clean.

False modesty is one of those things that’s hard to go easy on, like squirting whipped cream from a can.

It didn’t used to be this difficult to get a decent naked selfie. Maybe the quality of the light was changing; global warming.

Who really knows why anyone does anything?

Menopause coinciding with the death of a family member has brought to me the lesson that to live, truly and completely, you have to be willing to let go. Of everything and everyone.

Imagine getting up right now, slipping out the front door, and finding that all the women in the neighborhood were also leaving their houses. We were all running to the same field, a place we hadn't discussed but implicitly knew we would meet in when the tipping point tipped. We ran like horses, but we weren't horses, so after the initial hugs, there wasn't anything to do there in the grass. Everyone started checking their phones to see if their partners were calling. And they were not yet. We hadn't been gone long enough. Soon it was just a million women waiting for their mates to call, to be needed and then to fall into panic and guilt, to be torn, which was our primary state. Start the revolution here, now, in this field, or drive home and slip back into the fold, use the electric toothbrush, feel grim and trapped. Of course, there was no decision to make because we were all already home, not in a field. There was no collective tipping point. Most of us wouldn't do anything very different, ever. Our yearning and quiet rage would be suppressed and seep into our children, and they would hate this about us enough to do it a new way. That was how most change happened, not within one lifetime, but between generations. If you really wanted to change your belief that you're both yourself and your baby, you had to let yourself be completely reborn within one life. Of course, the danger was in risking everything, destroying everything…

But to be clear, I had not, at any age, desired a specific male body in the way I did now. While all my boyfriends and crushes had been reasonably good-looking, my attraction hovered up near their face, where they kept their talent and power. Lusting for the whole length of a person, head to toe, was what body-rooted fuckers did, Jordi, and men. Now, for the first time, I understood what all the fuss was about. How something beautiful could strike your heart, move you, bring you down on your knees and then, somewhat perversely, you wanted to fuck that pure, beautiful thing. Sex was a way to have it, to not just look at it but to be with it. I suddenly understood all of classical art. The endless carved nudes, Venus in her shell, David. And sexy clothes. I had worn them without really understanding why, thinking of sexy as one of many styles, not realizing it was the only style. You should always be emerging from a shell if possible. Without knowing it, without really understanding it, I had been a body for other people but I had not gotten to have one myself. I had not participated in the infuriating pleasure of wanting a real and specific body on Earth. I lay in the center of the bed, unblinking. Wanting a body had a seriousness to it. When you said you might never recover, you really meant it. This kind of desire made a wound you just had to carry with you for the rest of your life. But this was still better than never knowing. Or I hoped it was. Because in truth it was like a bad dream, a nightmare. Life didn’t just get better and better. You could actually miss out on something and that was that. That was your chance and now it was over. I wondered if I would continue with my work and then I realized that my work was all I had now. I had gotten it completely wrong—I thought I was laboring toward a prize, but the prize was right there, I already had it, and work was something I could do afterward, after I was no longer young enough to be beautiful and could no longer be wanted by someone beautiful. — How’s

most people were in some form of recovery; it was the secret undernetting to the world I lived in. If you didn’t know about recovery and exercise you were out of touch with the human plight. There

like two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned our drink. Forever thirsty but forever wanting the other one to take the first sip. You go. No, you go ahead! No, please, after you.

Divorce, just the word, used to feel serrated like a knife, something to wave around dangerously. Now I associated it with taxes, paperwork, bureaucracy. It might make sense, eventually, but what a headache. Marriage, too.

Throughout my life men had been pushing their big fingers into my mouth and although I went along with it, I always thought, Are you out of your mind? What should I put in there next? Your shoe? How about I just lick the pavement?

He didn’t understand that you could create a world—a fantasy, a nightmare—and bring other people into it, not just artistically but in life. I was pretty good at getting people to meet me in my mind, but ultimately no one wanted to stay there.

My friends are always obliging me with ephemera like this—screenshots of sexts, emails to their mothers—because I’m forever wanting to know what it feels like to be other people. What were we all doing? What the hell was going on here on Earth?

At five o'clock I have to consciously dial myself down before reentering the house, like astronaut Buzz Aldrin preparing to unload the dishwasher immediately after returning from the moon. Don't talk about the moon, I remind myself. Ask everyone how their day was.

Although maybe midlife crises were just poorly marketed, maybe each one was profound and unique and it was only a few silly men in red convertibles who gave them a bad name. I imagined greeting such a man solemnly: I see you have reached a time of great questioning. God be with you, seeker.

As someone treated a certain way their entire adult life because they were voluptuous and pretty, it’s become a joy to be unseen. But it was a bit of a journey, letting go, and boy how I wish I could tell other women struggling with the fade of their bloom how great life is once you let go of the flower.

She was leaving? I couldn’t believe it. But then I never can. I suddenly thought of Sam clicking the Lego tower into every corner. My old feeling of stunned abandonment (or perhaps at this point it was a monument to abandonment, a tower) fit any loss, regardless of size. Kris didn’t want to talk about it, but other people did; Arkanda did. I could have this conversation again and again if I wanted, for the rest of my life. I get it, Sam. There are corners everywhere. “I guess it’s late, isn’t it?” I said, looking at my phone. Almost midnight. “Nah, not for me. I’m headed to the studio!” She clapped her hands together. “I don’t use clocks or calendars. Every time is now; every day is Tuesday.

In some ways it was easier to parent alone. I could run a very tight ship. I had Sam making their own bed and folding napkins, both of us running on a perfect schedule. But the days were somehow anemic, hollow, even with made-up games and foods, riding bikes, and long baths; I couldn’t seem to generate a healthy, hearty family feeling on my own. It felt like an act.

going forward, things would not work out, disappointment would reign. My grandmother knew this, and her daughter. Everyone older knew. It was a devastating secret we kept from young people. We didn’t want to ruin their fun and also it was embarrassing; they couldn’t imagine a reality this bad so we let them think our lives were just like theirs, only older. The only honest

Start the revolution here, now, in this field? Or drive home and slip back into the fold, use the electric toothbrush, feel grim and trapped? Of course there was no decision to make because we were all already home, not in a field. There was no collective tipping point. Most of us wouldn’t do anything very different, ever. Our yearning and quiet rage would be suppressed and seep into our children and they would hate this about us enough to do it a new way. That was how most change happened, not within one lifetime but between generations. If you really wanted to change you had to believe that you were both yourself and your baby; you had to let yourself be completely reborn within one life. Of course the danger was in risking everything, destroying everything, for nothing. As I had done tonight.

Maybe it all began now, my life as a wife comfortable in her own home, a real wife. I tried to remember how Pinocchio had become a real boy. It had something to do with being in a whale, maybe saving his father's life; I hadn't done anything like that. But surely a woman was more complex than a puppet boy and she might become herself not once-and-for-all but cyclically: waxing, waning, sometimes disappearing altogether.

What you see is what you get,” these women said about themselves. For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces—each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand. I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I turned.

If you had hormonal constancy, as men did, you might not be taking your cues from your body about when to rest. You would have to build that in: Sunday is the day we don’t work, God’s day. But if what defined the days was you, your biological clock and calendar, then every day might as well be Tuesday. Perhaps you wanted to work for two weeks solid, recording a hit #1 album, and then rest for one whole week, while you were bleeding.

Now he touched two fingers to his forehead and I did the same, relieved. We’d done this saluting thing the first time we ever laid eyes on each other and across many crowded rooms ever since. There you are. He didn’t look away. Dancers kept moving between us, but he held on for a moment longer, we both did. I smiled a little but this wasn’t really about happiness; it hit below fleeting feelings. At this slight remove all our formality falls away, revealing a mutual and steadfast devotion so tender I could have cried right there on the dance floor. Sure, he’s good‑looking, unflappable, insightful, but none of that would mean anything without this strange, almost pious, loyalty between us. Now we both knew to turn away. Other couples might have crossed the room toward each other and kissed, but we understood the feeling would disappear if we got too close. It’s some kind of Greek tragedy, us, but not all told.

And now in this lifetime we only felt right when we were saving a life together, fixing a flat tire by the side of the highway; we only became us against insurmountable odds. The rest of the time we respectfully forgave each other for utterly failing to be what we felt we deserved and then some of the time we were fucking furious about this and it seemed impossible to continue, but this itself was a sort of emergency and thus brought out our lifesaving skills, our diligence and seriousness. And so we were condemned to a very rigorous, if joyless, life that was profoundly meaningful until suddenly one day it wasn’t. Because I had felt joy. Stupid, pointless

Wanting a body had a seriousness to it. When you said you might never recover, you really meant it. This kind of desire made a wound you just had to carry with you for the rest of your life. But this was still better than never knowing. Or I hoped it was. Because in truth it was like a bad dream, a nightmare. Life didn’t just get better and better. You could actually miss out on something and that was that. That was your chance and now it was over. I wondered if I would continue with my work and then I realized that my work was all I had now. I had gotten it completely wrong—I thought I was laboring toward a prize, but the prize was right there, I already had it, and work was something I could do afterward, after I was no longer young enough to be beautiful and could no longer be wanted by someone beautiful. —

You mean nonmonogamy?" she said, neutrally. "No, no, no." I was now so nervous that I was almost tearful. "It would be our own thing, not that! We'd have to really talk about it, down the road. Make rules. When we know each other better." I saw us sitting on the living room floor in front of her cozy fireplace, drawing up our bylaws. Old wounds would be tenderly revealed, kinks admitted; there would be laughing and crying and pauses for self-regulation. Then, given all this information (and in the context of Harris and Sam), we would know what sort of specific, customized relationship was right for the two of us. And it could change! As we changed! I didn't say any of this, but I thought about it while she kissed me. Frankly, I was proud that I'd said anything at all and that it had gone so well— apparently, based on this kiss.

And if he was still too moral I'd explain my situation. That I wanted to have sex with him before I died, because after I died I'd have to go on living for another forty-five years.

[T]he rest of my life would be a slog and then I would die. Which is the case for many people. It's no big deal.

and it was unclear what would happen to her after that but probably more good stuff! Better and better! And the woman in her seventies, well, nobody except the doctor knew—or could even conceive of—what was going on between her legs, though I tried and saw gray labia, long and loose, ball sacks emptied of their balls. How did it feel to still be dragging your pussy into this same office, decades after all the reproductive fanfare? She was scrolling on her phone, seemingly unbothered or unaware that she had nothing to look forward to, cunt-wise.

…a mutual ex always draws women together like magnets.

Kansas to Indianapolis, stopping in Casey, Illinois, to visit the world’s largest collection of world’s largest objects.

All of the hormones that made me want to seem approachable so l could breed are gone and replaced by hormones that are fiercely protective of my autonomy and freedom.

I saw his point. The words, though old-school, had a weird power. A few seconds ago we had been in a play and now it was turning into real life. If you wanted to be sure the play would end the curtain would fall-then you shouldn't say those words.

Maybe it all began now, my life as a wife comfortable in her own home, a real wife. I tried to remember how Pinocchio had become a real boy. It had something to do with being in a whale, maybe saving his father's life; I hadn't done anything like that. But surely a woman was more complex than a puppet boy and she might become herself not once-and-for-all but cyclically: waxing, waning, sometimes disappearing altogether.

If this age, 45, turned out to be the halfway point of my life, then this moment, right now, was the exact midpoint. A body rises, reaches an apex, and then falls. But at the apex, the peak, it is perfectly still. For a moment, neither rising nor falling.

Nabolom,

I tried to imagine a woman just like me, but without secrets, unapologetic. Would such a woman be acceptable? Or would she be cast out like a witch? And why such a fear of being cast out when that wasn't even really a thing anymore? Because we were all witches until very recently. We were cast out and burned at the stake only 300 years ago. That's nothing. No time at all.

No, no, not at all. Just that if you don’t transform . . . that’s fine, too.

In the morning the sky was gray and there was a grim feeling like this would be my last day on Earth. Which for all we knew it would be. This wasn’t like flying, where you could reassure yourself that driving was a hundred times more dangerous; this was driving.

Without knowing it, without really understanding it, I had been a body for other people but I had not gotten to have one myself. I had not participated in the infuriating pleasure of wanting a real and specific body on Earth.

There was a giant bath sheet, a hand towel, a washcloth, and another one that Claire described as a “demi-towel”—it was for anything truly dirty, like a toothpastey mouth or hair with conditioner in it. “The demi-towel preserves the other towels for your face and body,” she said, placing it beside the sink. “Did you make up ‘demi-towel’?” I whispered.

birth was being thrown energetically up into the air, we aged as we rose. At the height of our ascent we were middle-aged and then we fell for the rest of our lives, the whole second half. Falling might take just as long, but it was nothing like rising. The whole time you were rising you could not imagine what came next in your particular, unique journey; you could not see around the corner. Whereas falling ended the same way for everyone.

I try to keep most of myself neatly contained off-site. In the home I focus on turning the wheel of the household so we can enjoy a smooth, healthy life without disaster or illness. This involves perpetual planning.