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.
Miranda JulyRead
After I had my son I looked everywhere for a book that might serve as some kind of mirror. I bought so many silly books. Now I see what the problem was: I wanted a book about time-about mortality. I can't think of a writer who is at once so experimentally daring and so rigorously uncompromising as Sarah Manguso. Ongoingness is an incredibly elegant, wise book, and I loved it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the search for meaningful reflections on life and mortality through literature, particularly after becoming a parent.
Miranda July expresses her desire for a book that reflects her experiences and thoughts on time and mortality, especially after the profound life change of becoming a parent. She recognizes a gap in available literature that addresses these complex themes, ultimately praising Sarah Manguso's 'Ongoingness' for its elegance and wisdom in tackling such significant topics, showcasing the importance of literary explorations of life’s deeper questions.
Themes
MortalityParenthoodLiteratureReflectionTime
In practice
Example use cases
In a book club discussion about the implications of parenthood and life choices.
More from Miranda July
All quotes →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.
Miranda JulyRead
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 JulyRead
I have female friends who work in all different mediums who I speak to at least once a week. It helps me so much to know that I'm not alone. I think that's the bare minimum you need to sustain yourself - some sort of context of other women making things.
Miranda JulyRead
Long before I started to write in earnest, Lorrie Moore taught me you could have a woman narrator who was funny and complex and even wrongheaded. She opened up a lot of space that me and a million other women rushed into.
Miranda JulyRead
Similar quotes
If certain books are to be termed 'immigrant fiction,' what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn't agree with me.
Jhumpa LahiriRead
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair
Stephen KingRead
There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can't tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he's liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can't adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book.
Nora EphronRead
A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.
Charles BaxterRead
The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
Milan KunderaRead