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The angel in man
has also been my own life-long obsession. In a sense I believe it has always been the problem of the creative being ... obsessed ... with the idea of re-creating the world in order, as I see it, to re-establish man's innocence. -- Henry Miller
America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still. -- Henry Miller
Those interested in celestial navigation are advised to first obtain a rudimentary knowledge of integral calculus, phlebotomy, astral physics and related subjects. The use of liquor is strictly forbidden on interplanetary flights. -- Henry Miller
This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty ... what you will. -- Henry Miller
To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth - I count that something of a miracle. -- Henry Miller
He saw that science had become as great a hoax as religion, that nationalism was a farce, patriotism a fraud, education a form of leprosy, and that morals were for cannibals -- Henry Miller
Her words imbued it with a peculiar fragrance; it was no longer just her private organ, but a treasure, a magic, potent treasure, a God-given thing
and none the less so because she traded it day and day out for a few pieces or silver. -- Henry Miller
I want to undress you, vulgarize you a bit. -- Henry Miller
The life which, if i were still a man with pride, honor, ambition and so forth, would seem like the bottom rung of degredation. It's a negative reality, just like death
a sort of heaven without the pain and terror of dying. -- Henry Miller
Reality is not protected or defended by laws, proclamations, ukases, cannons and armadas. Reality is that which is sprouting all the time out of death and disintegration. -- Henry Miller
A world without hope, but no despair -- Henry Miller
Remorse is impotence; it will sin again. Only repentance is strong - it can end everything. -- Henry Miller
I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must writer and write and write, even if everybody in the world advises you against it, even if nobody believes in you. -- Henry Miller
There are times when I myself no longer know whether I said and did the things I report or whether I dreamed them up. Anyway, I always dream true. If I lie a bit now and then it is mainly in the interest of truth. -- Henry Miller
I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead. -- Henry Miller
Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood. -- Henry Miller
If you can't give the is-ness of a thing give the not-ness of it! The main thing is to hook up, get the wheels turning, sound off. When your brakes jam, try going in reverse. If often works. -- Henry Miller
But that was a long time ago and since then a crab has been gnawing at my vitals. All this began in the Metro (first-class) with the phrase - 'l'homme que j'etais, je ne le suis plus. -- Henry Miller
For her were meant those terrible words of Louis-Philippe, and a night comes when all is over, when so many jaws have closed upon us that we no longer have the strength to stand, and our meat hangs upon our bodies, as though it had been masticated by every mouth. -- Henry Miller
To wander farther was to wander alone, to rely wholly upon oneself. -- Henry Miller
Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs. -- Henry Miller
I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company. -- Henry Miller
One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one. -- Henry Miller
Surrealism is merely the reflection of the death process. It is one of the manifestations of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end. -- Henry Miller
Paint what you like and die happy -- Henry Miller
Seeking, knowing, discovering, enjoying- these faculties or powers are pale and lifeless without realization. -- Henry Miller
How different the new order would be if we could consult the veteran instead of the politician. -- Henry Miller
Overcoming the world. And thus finding it. For we must not only be in it and above it, but of it too. To love it for what it is- how difficult! And yet it's the first, the only task. Evade it, and you are lost. Lose yourself in it and you are free. -- Henry Miller
We have no need for genius - genius is dead. We have need for strong hands, for spirits who are willing to give up the ghost and put on flesh ... -- Henry Miller
Before I shall have become a man again I shall probably exist as a park, a sort of natural park in which people come to rest, to while away the time. What they say or do will be of little matter, for they will bring only their fatigue, their boredom, their hopelessness. -- Henry Miller
There are evidences of a very great art in Europe as long as twenty-five thousand years ago, and in Egypt as far back as sixty thousand years. Money had nothing to to do with the production of these treasures. Money will have nothing to do with the art of the future. -- Henry Miller
The world is divided into three parts of which two parts are meat balls and spaghetti and the other part a huge syphilitic chancre.
(revised, correct quote) -- Henry Miller
The world is two thirds spaghetti and meatballs, one third syphilitic chancre. -- Henry Miller
Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him. -- Henry Miller
I know we were conjugating the verb love like two maniacs trying to fuck through an iron gate. -- Henry Miller
I saw through to the last sign and symbol, but I could not read her face. I could see only the eyes shining through, huge, fleshy-like luminous beasts, as though I were swimming behind them in the electric effluvia of her incandescent vision. -- Henry Miller
This keeping oneself alive, out of a blind urge to defeat death, is in itself a means of sowing death. Every one who has not fully accepted life, who is not incrementing life, is helping to fill the world with death. -- Henry Miller
You start with the sublime and end up in an alley jerking away for dear life. -- Henry Miller
What I really hoped for, no doubt, was to come upon one of those lives which begin nowhere, which lead us through marshes and salt flats, trickling away, seemingly without plan, purpose or goal, and suddenly emerge, gushing like geysers, and never cease gushing, even in death. -- Henry Miller
Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. -- Henry Miller
I study you so much to discover the possible flaws, the weak points, the danger zones. I don't find them - not any. That means I am in love, blind, blind. To be blind forever. -- Henry Miller
People used to envy me my inspiration. I hate inspiration. It takes you over completely. I could never wait until it passed and I got rid of it. -- Henry Miller
If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things. -- Henry Miller
But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn't Bach or Beethoven; music is the can opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there's a roof to your being. -- Henry Miller
It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir. -- Henry Miller
She felt that in everything, sublime or ignoble, there was hidden a turbulent, a vital force, a significance and beauty which art, however glorious, was but a pale refection. "I want to live!" she muttered wildly. "I want to live! -- Henry Miller
You can go to the trenches and be blown to bits; nothing will create that spark of passion if there isn't the intervention of a human hand. Somebody has to put his hand into the machine and let it be wrenched off if the cogs are to mesh again. -- Henry Miller
The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition. -- Henry Miller
If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch. -- Henry Miller
We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets - we remember only. -- Henry Miller
We're creators by permission, by grace as it were. No one creates alone, of and by himself. An artist is an instrument that registers something already existent, something which belongs to the whole world, and which, if he is an artist, he is compelled to give back to the world. -- Henry Miller
We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. -- Henry Miller
The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love. -- Henry Miller
Yes, he knows how to build a fire, but I know how to inflame a cunt. -- Henry Miller
Work on one thing at a time until finished. -- Henry Miller
Real wisdom is being stored away in the subcellars by the misers of learning. -- Henry Miller
In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other. -- Henry Miller
A good meal, a good talk, a good fuck
what better way to pass the day? -- Henry Miller
Over there you think of nothing but becoming President of the United States some day. Potentially every man is Presidential timber. Here it's different. Here every man is potentially a zero. If you become something or somebody it is an accident, a miracle. -- Henry Miller
Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You congeal into a bundle of inanimate fear. You become the very soul of anesthesia. But there is no escaping him. It is your turn now ... -- Henry Miller
My hunger and curiosity drive me forward in all directions at once. -- Henry Miller
Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense. -- Henry Miller
Believe me; there's nothing clean, nothing healthy, nothing promising about this age of wonders - except the telling. -- Henry Miller
Whoever uses the spirit that is
in him creatively is an artist. To
make living itself an art, that is
the goal. -- Henry Miller
I'm a bit retarded, like most Americans. -- Henry Miller
Certainly paradise, whatever, wherever it be, contains flaws. (Paradisical flaws, if you like.) If it did not, it would be incapable of drawing the hearts of men or angels. -- Henry Miller
I had no time to make a world of my own: I had to stay fixed like Atlas, my feet on the elephant's back and the elephant on the tortoise's back. To inquire on what the tortoise stood would be to go mad. -- Henry Miller
It's like saying to a drowning man: What a pity, what a pity! If you had only let me teach you how to swim! Everybody wants to right the world, nobody wants help his neighbor. They want to make a man of you without taking your body into consideration. It's all cockeyed. -- Henry Miller
One thing is certain, that when you die and are resurrected you belong to the earth and whatever is of the earth is yours inalienably. You become an anomaly of nature, a being without shadow; you will never die again but only pass away like the phenomena about you. -- Henry Miller
When I look down into this fucked out cunt of a whore I feel the whole world beneath me, a world tottering and crumbling, a world used up and polished like a leper's skull. -- Henry Miller
There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry. -- Henry Miller
Surely every one realizes, at some point along the way, that he is capable of living a far better life than the one he has chosen. -- Henry Miller
The word in your mouth is anarchy. -- Henry Miller
Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines - these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm. -- Henry Miller
It was you, you who brought me the pardon. Pee on me, won't you. It would be like benediction. O, what a sleepwalker I have been! -- Henry Miller
And the books you write. They're not you. They're not me sitting here, this Henry Miller. They belong to someone else. It's terrible. You can never rest. -- Henry Miller
I felt free and chained at the same time - like one feels just before election, when all the crooks have been nominated and you are beseeched to vote for the right man. -- Henry Miller
A great work of art, if it accomplishes anything, serves to remind us, or let us say to set us dreaming, of all that is fluid and intangible. -- Henry Miller
It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd. -- Henry Miller
The word civilization to my mind is coupled with death. When I use the word, I see civilization as a crippling, thwarting thing, a stultifying thing. For me it was always so. I don't believe in the golden ages, you see ... civilization is the arteriosclerosis of culture. -- Henry Miller
You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual. -- Henry Miller
On the meridian of time, there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. -- Henry Miller
No one asks you to throw Mozart out of the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Lao Tzu and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes. -- Henry Miller
I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth, so help me God. And I thought I was. I found I couldn't. Nobody can write the absolute truth. -- Henry Miller
You are always laughing at the wrong moment; you are considered cruel and heartless when in reality you are only tough and durable. But if you would laugh when others laugh and weep when they weep then you must be prepared to die as they die and live as they live. -- Henry Miller
What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it? -- Henry Miller
I have overspread the world like a syrup and the emptiness of it it's terrifying, but there is no dislodging the seed; the seed has become a little knot of cold fire which roars like a sun in the vast hollow of the dead carcass. -- Henry Miller
I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth. -- Henry Miller
When one spends what he has on himselef, when one has a thoroughly good time with his own money, people are apt to say he doesn't know what to do with his money. -- Henry Miller
People who work themselves to the bone and when they produce young they preach to the young the gospel of work - which is nothing, at bottom, but the doctrine of inertia. -- Henry Miller
Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. -- Henry Miller
People are like lice - they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused. -- Henry Miller
All I ask of life, he says, is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt. -- Henry Miller
One's destruction is never a place, but rather a new way of seeing things. (Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch) -- Henry Miller
It is a duet, and like most duets moreover in that one listens attentively only for the signal which announces the advent of one's own voice. -- Henry Miller
Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous, and patient. -- Henry Miller
It is the great mass of mankind, the mob, the people, who create the permanently bad times. The world is only the mirror of ourselves. If it's something to make one puke, why then puke me lads, it's your own sick mugs you're looking at! -- Henry Miller
Life," said Emerson, "consists in what a man is thinking all day." If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine. I not only think about food all day, but I dream about it at night. -- Henry Miller
My understanding of the meaning of a book is that the book itself disappears from sight, that it is chewed alive, digested and incorporated into the system as flesh and blood which in turn creates new spirit and reshapes the world. -- Henry Miller
The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself -- Henry Miller
When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat. -- Henry Miller
Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future, too, like something out of Fritz Lang's feeble imagination. -- Henry Miller
The one thing that we can never get enough of is Love and the one thing we never give enough is Love. -- Henry Miller
And again that big, bushy thing of hers worked its bloom and magic. It began to have an independent existence for me too. There was Germaine and there was that rose bush of hers.. I liked them separately and I liked them together. -- Henry Miller
For a metaphysical treat stop at the Big Sur Inn, which is also a haven for stray cats and dogs. Life along the South Coast is just a bed of roses, with a few thorns and nettles interspersed. -- Henry Miller
The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul's death, and coincident with the disappearance of great men, great deeds, great causes, great wars, etc. -- Henry Miller
If it be knowledge or wisdom one is seeking, then one had better go direct to the source. And the source is not the scholar or philosopher, not the master, saint, or teacher, but life itself - direct experience of life. The same is true for art. Here, too, we an dispense with the masters. -- Henry Miller
Life was a perpetual black fuck about a fixed pole of insomnia. -- Henry Miller
Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is. -- Henry Miller
They cut the umbilical cord, give you a slap on the ass, and presto! you're out in the world, adrift, a ship without a rudder. -- Henry Miller
Sometimes I think I'm an artist. Once in a great while I even think I may be a visionary, but never a prophet, a seer. -- Henry Miller
To think that he can lie beside that furnace I stoked for him and do nothing but make water! -- Henry Miller
Until he [man] has become fully human, until he learns to conduct himself as a member of the earth, he will continue to create gods who will destroy him. The tragedy of Greece lies not in the destruction of a great culture but in the abortion of a great vision. -- Henry Miller
Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil. -- Henry Miller
I had learned to harness ignorance with presumption. I was ready to become an unacknowledged watercolorist. -- Henry Miller
It was just the human fatality of things, a cancer worse than blame, or hate or love. -- Henry Miller
The prisoner is not the one who has commited a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over. -- Henry Miller
In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest. -- Henry Miller
Giving and receiving are at bottom one thing, dependent on whether one lives open or closed. Living openly one becomes a medium, a transmitter; living thus, as a river, one experiences life to the full, flows along with the current of life, and dies in order to live again as an ocean. -- Henry Miller
We create our fate every day that we live. -- Henry Miller
To love or be loved is no crime. the really criminal thing is to make a person believe that he or she is the only one you could ever love. -- Henry Miller
Every so often I revolt, even against what I believe in with all my heart. I have to attack everything, myself included. Why? To simplify things. -- Henry Miller
One can sleep almost anywhere, but one must have a place to work. Even if it's not a masterpiece you're doing. Even a bad novel requires a chair to sit on and a bit of privacy. -- Henry Miller
Often she would lock herself in her room and sitting before the mirror, apply the makeup of John Barrymore, Barrymore of The Sea Beast or of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Seeing these gruesome images in the mirror she would being to rave. "Who am I?" she would say. "What am I? -- Henry Miller
And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words? -- Henry Miller
I would say that the "masterpiece" was the creative act itself and not a particular work which happened to please a large audience and be accepted as the very body of Christ. -- Henry Miller
Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge and on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, and not one idiot ever thinks of blowing up the bridge. -- Henry Miller
He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. -- Henry Miller
To paint is to love again, and to love is to live life to the fullest. -- Henry Miller
She may be lying in bed reading a book, she may be making love with a prize fighter, or she may be running like mad through a field of stubble, one shoe one, one shoe off, a man named Corn Cob pursuing her hotly. Wherever she is I am standing in complete darkness; her absence blots me out. -- Henry Miller
One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life. -- Henry Miller
Music is still the antidote for the nameless ... Music is planetary fire, an irreducible which is all sufficient; it is the slate-writing of the gods ... -- Henry Miller
There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books -- Henry Miller
I think someday you're going to be a great writer," he said. "But" he added maliciously, "first you'll have to suffer a bit. I mean really suffer, because you don't know what the word means yet. You only think you've suffered. You've got to fall in love first. -- Henry Miller
Remember that you're far back in the procession; remember that a whole army corps has laid siege to her, that she's been laid waste, plundered and pillaged. -- Henry Miller
We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it means danger, revolution, anarchy. -- Henry Miller
All my Calvaries were rosy crucifixions, pseudo-tragedies to keep the fires of hell burning brightly for the real sinners who are in danger of being forgotten. -- Henry Miller
The act of dreaming, like a draught of fresh air in an abandoned house, situates the furniture of the mind in a new ambiance. -- Henry Miller
He looks about the room at the few sticks of furniture, at the dirty bed sheets and the wash basin with the dirty water still in it, and he says: "I am a slave!" Every day he says it, not once, but a dozen times. And then he takes his guitar from the wall and sings. -- Henry Miller
It has been that way ever since the Greeks - a blind fuck in the mud and then a quick spawn and then death. -- Henry Miller
You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread. -- Henry Miller
The concert is a polite form of self induced torture. -- Henry Miller
A man of good will with a little effort and belief in his own powers can enjoy a deep, tranquil, rich life - provided he go his own way ... To live one's own life is still the best way of life, always was and always will be. -- Henry Miller
Many is the mirage I chased. Always I was overreaching myself. The oftener I touched reality, the harder I bounced back to the world of illusion, which is the name for everyday life. -- Henry Miller
Perhaps it was the fact of having no father that pushed him along the road toward the discovery of the self, which is the final process of identification with the world and the realization consequently of the uselessness of ties. -- Henry Miller
It was only in my forties that I started feeling young. -- Henry Miller
For in Mexico, ladies and gentlemen, it's always high noon and what glows is fuchsia and what's dead is dead and no feather-dusters. -- Henry Miller
I believe in saying the truth, coming out with it cold, shocking if necessary, not disguising it. -- Henry Miller
It's beautiful to have a smoking jacket, a good cigar and a wife who plays the piano. So relaxing. So lenitive. Between the acts you go out for a smoke and a breath of fresh air. -- Henry Miller
One doesn't want appreciation... one wants response. To tell you the truth, I don't know what I want of you, or of anybody for that matter. I want more than I get, that's all I know. I want you to step out of your skin - I want everybody to strip down, not just to the flesh, but the soul. -- Henry Miller
Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him. -- Henry Miller
The practice of any art demands more than 'mere savoir faire'. One must not only be in love with what one does, one must also know how to make love. In love self is obliterated. Only the beloved counts. -- Henry Miller
The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts. -- Henry Miller
A man, when he's burning up with passion, wants to see things; he wants to see everything, even how they make water. And while it's all very nice to know that a woman has a mind, literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed. -- Henry Miller
Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously. -- Henry Miller
Our whole theory of education is based on the absurd notion that we must learn to swim on land before tackling the water. It applies to the pursuit of the arts as well as to the pursuit of knowledge. -- Henry Miller
If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller
He wakes up cursing himself, or cursing the job, or cursing life. -- Henry Miller
But about the smell of rancid butter ... There are good associations too. When I think of this rancid butter I see myself standing in a little, old world courtyard, a very smelly, very dreary courtyard. Through the cracks in the shutters strange figures peer out at me. -- Henry Miller
The blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way. -- Henry Miller
Music is the can-opener of the soul. -- Henry Miller
Everything is packed into a second which is either consummated or not consummated. -- Henry Miller
Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war. -- Henry Miller
It's the pleasure of picking up the brush and seeing what happens. -- Henry Miller
We must be holy without holiness. We must be whole, complete. That's being holy. Any other kind of holiness is false, a snare, and a delusion. -- Henry Miller
It is with the soul that we grasp the essence of another human being, not with the mind, nor even with the heart. -- Henry Miller
And, though reading may not at first blush seem like an act of creation, in a deep sense it is. Without the enthusiastic reader, who is really the author's counterpart and very often his most secret rival, a book would die. -- Henry Miller
If you're great, you can stay that way and people will believe in you, swear by you, turn the world upside down for you. But, if you're only partly great, or just a nobody, then what happens to you is lost. (Read by Henry Miller) -- Henry Miller
Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos. -- Henry Miller
The City of New York is like an enormous citadel, a modern Carcassonne. Walking between the magnificent skyscrapers one feels the presence on the fringe of a howling, raging mob, a mob with empty bellies, a mob unshaven and in rags. -- Henry Miller
The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them. -- Henry Miller
In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor. -- Henry Miller
I am not drunk, and I am not sentimental, and I tell you you are the most wonderful woman in the world. -- Henry Miller
Every time you come to the limit of what is demanded of you, you are faced with the same problem-to be yourself! -- Henry Miller
Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life's ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets. -- Henry Miller
No particular reason for anything. I'm free - that's the main thing. -- Henry Miller
the world is the mirror of myself dying. -- Henry Miller
Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery. -- Henry Miller
I have found God, but he is insufficient. -- Henry Miller
Topographically the country is magnificent - and terrifying. Why terrifying? Because nowhere else in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete. Nowhere have I encountered such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as here in America. Here boredom reaches its peak. -- Henry Miller
Heroism and obscenity appear no more important in the life of the universe than the fighting or mating of a pair of insects in the woods. All is on the same plane. -- Henry Miller
When you come, please be so kind as to check your neuroses and psychoses at the gate ... Fans and other obnoxious pests would do well to maintain silence. -- Henry Miller
The world isn't kept running because it's a paying proposition. (God doesn't make a cent on the deal.) The world goes on because a few men in every generation believe in it utterly, accept it unquestioningly; they underwrite it with their lives. -- Henry Miller
There is no progress: there is perpetual movement, displacement, which is circular, spiral, endless. Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it lead him. -- Henry Miller
I've lived out my melancholy youth. I don't give a fuck anymore what's behind me, or what's ahead of me. I'm healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day. Today! -- Henry Miller
The only law which is really lived up to whole-heartedly and with a vengeance is the law of conformity. -- Henry Miller
That we cannot rise equal to situations when we are in them - that is the tragedy of life. -- Henry Miller
When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently. -- Henry Miller
A beautiful nap this afternoon that put velvet between my vertebrae. -- Henry Miller
In this chthonian world the only thing of importance is orthography and punctuation. It doesn't matter what the nature of the calamity is, only whether it is spelled right. -- Henry Miller
slaying everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals. -- Henry Miller
She discovered what others know only too well in a cynical way, that people prefer to believe in and worship a god who is remote rather than live out the godlike nature which is their inherent being. -- Henry Miller
But it's just because the chances are all against you, just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here. -- Henry Miller
Think only what is right there, what is right under your nose to do. It's such a simple thing - that's why people can't do it. -- Henry Miller
My policy has always been to burn my bridges behind me. My face is always set toward the future. If I make a mistake it is fatal. When I am flung back I fall all the way back - to the very bottom. My one safeguard is my resiliency. So far I have always bounced back. -- Henry Miller
Either you take in believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird. -- Henry Miller
The only difference between the Adamic man and the man of today is that the one was born to Paradise and the other has to create it. -- Henry Miller
It was a crushing defeat, but it put iron in my backbone and sulphur in my blood. I knew at least what it was to fail. I knew what it was to attempt something big. -- Henry Miller
What we thrive on is hatred and violence; if we were a peaceable people we would have peace tomorrow. -- Henry Miller
No matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis. It is written in the sky; it flames and dances, like an evil portent. It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon. -- Henry Miller
I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face. -- Henry Miller
We live entirely in the past, nourished by dead thoughts, dead creeds, dead sciences. And it is the past which is engulfing us, not the future. The future always has and always will belong to - the poet. -- Henry Miller
i like everything that flows -- Henry Miller
To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts. -- Henry Miller
Writing, like life itself,
is a voyage of discovery. -- Henry Miller
I might say, in passing, that my life seems to have been one long search for the Mara who would devour all the others and give them significant reality. -- Henry Miller
The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference. -- Henry Miller
Men are lonely and out of communication with one another because all their inventions speak only of death. Death is the automaton which rules the world of activity. Death is silent, because it has no mouth. Death has never expressed anything. Death is wonderful too
after life. -- Henry Miller
He wakes up utterly bored and discomfited, chagrined to think that he did not die overnight. -- Henry Miller
The purpose of life is to remember. -- Henry Miller
Her fluency was marvelous. She would say things at random, intricate, flamelike, or slide off into a parenthetical limbo peppered with fireworks
admirable linguistic feats which a practiced writer might struggle for hours to achieve. -- Henry Miller
Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness. -- Henry Miller
New York has a trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness if you have no inner stabilizer. -- Henry Miller
Every day the choice is presented to us, to live up to the spirit that is in us, or deny it. -- Henry Miller
Jump off. You are a protected individual. Do not fear. -- Henry Miller
Why are we so full of restraint? Why do we not give in all directions? Is it fear of losing ourselves? Until we do lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves. -- Henry Miller
What seems nasty, painful, evil can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. -- Henry Miller
There are so many ways of walking about and the best, in my opinion, is the Greek way, because it is aimless, anarchic, thoroughly and discordantly human. -- Henry Miller
Don't look for miracles. You yourself are the miracle. -- Henry Miller
The only peace, the only security, is in fulfillment. -- Henry Miller
The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks. -- Henry Miller
It is getting toward dinner time and people are straggling back to their rooms with that weary, dejected air which comes from earning a living honestly. -- Henry Miller
At the opera, the music makes no sense; here in the street it has just the right demented touch to give it poignancy. -- Henry Miller
I thought I had found a living volcano, a female Vesuvius. I never thought of a human ship going down in an ocean of despair, in a Sargasso of impotence. -- Henry Miller
I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: The world of art is the only such realm. -- Henry Miller
I am positively against all this crap which is carried on first in the name of this thing, then in the name of that. I believe only in what is active, immediate, and personal. -- Henry Miller
Twilight hour. Indian blue, water of glass, trees glistening and liquescent. -- Henry Miller
She stood there waiting for me to approach, as though absolutely certain that I would take her by the arm and continue strolling down the avenue. -- Henry Miller
And her delicacy offended. Who wants a delicate whore! Claude would even ask you to turn your face away when she squatted over the bidet. All wrong! A man, when he's burning up with passion, wants to see things; he wants to see everything, even how they make water. -- Henry Miller
[ ... ] I know how to inflame a cunt. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania. I make your ovaries incandescent. -- Henry Miller
The man who is intoxicated with life does not pass judgment, does not seek to come to a conclusion, does not impose his message on the world. -- Henry Miller
The light of Greece opened my eyes, penetrated my pores, expanded my whole being. -- Henry Miller
In vacuum one has no need for new things, nor of excitement, nor of foreign stimuli. One has only to maintain a bare survival, to vegetate, like a fetus in a jar. -- Henry Miller
Like every man I am my own worst enemy, but unlike most men I know too that I am my own saviour. -- Henry Miller
How wonderful to put one's cunt to work and use one's brains for pleasure! -- Henry Miller
As long as that spark of passion is missing there is no human significance in the performance. -- Henry Miller
Dedication is not what others expect of you, it is what you can give to others. -- Henry Miller
Everything that belongs to the past seems to have fallen into the sea; I have memories, but the images have lost their vividness, they seem dead and desultory, like time - bitten mummies stuck in a quagmire. -- Henry Miller
The Greek knows how to live with his rags: they don't utterly degrade and befoul him as in other countries I have visited. -- Henry Miller
I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots. -- Henry Miller
An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness. -- Henry Miller
The wise man knows that every experience is to be viewed as a blessing. -- Henry Miller
The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order. -- Henry Miller
If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having. -- Henry Miller
I didn't give a fuck whether I found anything or not. The thing is, never to be too anxious. Everything comes in due time. -- Henry Miller
The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble. -- Henry Miller
Cluster together like stars! -- Henry Miller
They move about listlessly and apparently without much purpose; they might just as well be lunatics. -- Henry Miller
The Englishman, be it noted, seldom resorts to violence; when he is sufficiently goaded he simply opens up, like the oyster, and devours his adversary. -- Henry Miller
There is one other thing to know ... when you have expressed yourself to the fullest, then and only then will it dawn upon you that everything has already been expressed, not in words alone but in deed, and that all you need really do is say Amen! -- Henry Miller
The whole world seemed to unroll like a pornographic film whose tragic theme is impotence. -- Henry Miller
I wanted to die; I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for. -- Henry Miller
I used to think a bird couldn't fly if its wings got wet. -- Henry Miller
And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean, when boredom seems the very stuff of life. -- Henry Miller
I don't know whether you've ever had a woman eat an apple while you were doing it. Well, you can imagine how that affects you. -- Henry Miller
There is nothing in itself which is wrong or evil not even murder. -- Henry Miller
The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death. -- Henry Miller
France may one day exist no more, but the Dordogne will live on just as dreams live on and nourish the souls of men. -- Henry Miller
I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous man, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the man in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable -- Henry Miller
No man ever puts down what he intended to say ... words ... are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible. -- Henry Miller
Day by day. No yesterdays and no tomorrows. The barometer never changes, the flag is always at half-mast. -- Henry Miller
Real love is never perplexed, never qualifies, never rejects, never demands. It replenishes, by grace of restoring unlimited circulation. It burns, because it knows the true meaning of sacrifice. It is life illuminated. -- Henry Miller
Living with a whore
even the best whore in the world
isn't a bed of roses. -- Henry Miller
All growth is a leap in the dark. -- Henry Miller
The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought. -- Henry Miller
Acts are demanded, suicidal acts perhaps, but acts fraught with meaning. -- Henry Miller
Even if one's whole life were a mistake, there is always time to change. -- Henry Miller
Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race. -- Henry Miller
I can never go back on what I've written. If it was not good, it was true; if it was not artistic, it was sincere; if it was in bad taste, it was on the side of life. -- Henry Miller
I didn't have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let's say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing! -- Henry Miller
After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in. -- Henry Miller
Were there a Christian so faithful to his God as I was to her we would all be Jesus Christ today. -- Henry Miller
The before dinner atmosphere, the blend of patchouli, warm pitchblend, iced electricity, sugared sweat and powdered urine drives one on to a fever of delerious expectancy. -- Henry Miller
For there is only one great adventure and that is inward toward the self, and for that, time nor space nor even deeds matter. -- Henry Miller
Keep your libraries, your penal institutions, your insaneasylums ... give me beer.You think man needs rule, he needs beer. The world does not need morals, it needs beer ... The souls of men have been fed with indigestibles, but the soul could make use of beer. -- Henry Miller
Thyroid eyes. Michelin lips. Voice like pea soup. -- Henry Miller
The poet speaks adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly ... not with intellect alone, but with intellect inebriated by nectar. -- Henry Miller
I can never forget that Chinese student I knew in Paris - Mr. Tcheou, I think it was. One day, upon asking him if he had ever read Hamlet, he answered: "You mean that novel by Jack London? -- Henry Miller
Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk. -- Henry Miller
Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn't the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us. -- Henry Miller
Life is 440 horsepower in a 2-cylinder engine. -- Henry Miller
The world around me is dissolving leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away. -- Henry Miller
We are swimming on the face of time and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown. -- Henry Miller
[ ... ]as Sylvester says, a man who has never been afflicted with a neurosis does not know the meaning of suffering. -- Henry Miller
The world itself is pregnant with failure, is the perfect manifestation of imperfection, of the consciousness of failure. -- Henry Miller
I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul. -- Henry Miller
You have to write a million words before you find your voice as a writer. -- Henry Miller
It's as though there were two melodies going on simultaneously: one for private exploitation and the other for the public ear. The whole struggle is to squeeze into the public record some tiny essence of the perpetual inner melody. -- Henry Miller
Have you ever seen a genius out there looking for a job? it's the saddest thing in the world. no one will hire him. there is only one place where he is always welcome- at the bottom. -- Henry Miller
Previously, when I began to write this tale, I set out by saying that Mlle. Claude was a whore. She is a whore, of course, and I'm not trying to deny it, but what I say now is
if Mlle. Claude is a whore then what name shall I find for the other women I know? -- Henry Miller
Sweet or bitter, I am now convinced that all experience is enriching and rewarding. Above all, instructive. -- Henry Miller
I read to be taken out of myself, to become ecstatic. -- Henry Miller
A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. -- Henry Miller
I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen. -- Henry Miller
Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. -- Henry Miller
I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object. -- Henry Miller
I haven't any allegiance, any responsibilities, any hatreds, any worries, any prejudices, any passion. I'm neither for nor against. I'm a neutral. -- Henry Miller
It's terrible to be civilized, because when you come to the end of the world you have nothing to support the terror of loneliness. -- Henry Miller
I will never again go to people under false pretenses even if it is to give them the Holy Bible. I will never again sell anything, even if I have to starve. I am going home now and I will sit down and really write about people. -- Henry Miller
It is silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars and hypocrites. -- Henry Miller
I soon found out you can't change the world. The best you can do is to learn to live with it. -- Henry Miller
The word which gives the key to the national vice is waste. And people who are wasteful are not wise, neither can they remain young and vigorous. In order to transmute energy to higher and more subtle levels one must first conserve it. -- Henry Miller
What I want is to open up. I want to know what's inside me. I want everybody to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin
to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I'm sure of it. -- Henry Miller
Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was intact. -- Henry Miller
( ... )I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself. Nothing that happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed but my illusions( ... ) -- Henry Miller
The artist is now giving a first coat of paint to that tautly stretched canvas which the scientist has been so busy stretching that he has forgotten the use he intended to put it to. -- Henry Miller
To the man whose senses are alive and alert there is not even the need to stir from one's threshold. -- Henry Miller
Confirmations, corroborations rather than disillusionment. At eighteen I was as much of a philosopher as I ever will be. -- Henry Miller
By choosing to live above the ordinary level we create extraordinary problems for ourselves. -- Henry Miller
I used to think then that all the tragic events of life were written down in books and that what went on outside was just diluted crap. -- Henry Miller
Destiny is what you are supposed to do in life. Fate is what kicks you in the ass to make you do it. -- Henry Miller
Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane. -- Henry Miller
New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold, glittering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. -- Henry Miller
The poem is the dream made flesh, in a two-fold sense: as work of art, and as life, which is a work of art. -- Henry Miller
And with that he began to laugh, not a laugh either, but a cackle, a hideous cackle like a rooster with its head on the block. It got him so badly that he had to stop and hold his guts; the tears were streaming down his eyes and between the cackles he let out the most terrible heartrending sobs. -- Henry Miller
The enchanting, and sometimes terrifying, thing is that the world can be so many things to so many different souls. That it can be, and is, all these things at once and the same time. -- Henry Miller
No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in. -- Henry Miller
Night is longing, longing, longing, beyond all endurance. -- Henry Miller
It seems to me that everything dates from that aborted affair. -- Henry Miller
Instead of asking 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask 'How much good? How much joy?' -- Henry Miller
What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment? -- Henry Miller
We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests. -- Henry Miller
It was here in Big Sur that I first learned to say 'amen.' -- Henry Miller
To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. -- Henry Miller
We kill because we are afraid of our own shadow, afraid that if we used a little common sense we'd have to admit that our glorious principles were wrong. -- Henry Miller
There's nothing wrong with the world. What's wrong is our way of looking at it. -- Henry Miller
Even the idiot may have a message for us -- Henry Miller
It's a wonderful thing, for half an hour, to have money in your pocket and piss it away like a drunken sailor. You feel as though the world is yours. And the best part of it is, you don't know what to do with it. -- Henry Miller
I made up my mind that I would hold onto nothing, that I would expect nothing. -- Henry Miller
The goal of life is not to possess power but to radiate it. -- Henry Miller
Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself. -- Henry Miller
It is the obscene horror, the dry, fucked-out aspect of things which makes this crazy civilization look like a crater. It is this great yawning gulf of nothingness which the creative spirits and mothers of the race carry between their legs. -- Henry Miller
Everything hinges on how you look at things -- Henry Miller
I tried to look earnest, but I only succeeded in looking pathetic. -- Henry Miller
Of course you don't die. Nobody dies. Death doesn't exist. You only reach a new level of vision, a new realm of consciousness, a new unknown world. -- Henry Miller
Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it. -- Henry Miller
I reached out for something to attach myself to - and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for - myself. -- Henry Miller
Part of the act of creating is in discovering your own kind. They are everywhere. But don't look for them in the wrong places. -- Henry Miller
To make absolute, unconditional surrender to the woman one loves is to break every bond save the desire not to lose her, which is the most terrible bond of all -- Henry Miller
Though I've known you a short time, I feel I know you intimately. Not your life but you, your emotions, your dreams, your aspirations. -- Henry Miller
Peace! It's wonderful! -- Henry Miller
I do not believe in words, no matter if strung together by the most skillful man: I believe in language, which is something beyond words, something which words give only an adequate illusion of. -- Henry Miller
And no one sets about saving the world unless he has first experienced the miracle of personal salvation. -- Henry Miller
The best technique is none at all. -- Henry Miller
Can you stop dead, and without thinking, radiate the truth which you know? -- Henry Miller
Fame is an illusive thing - here today, gone tomorrow. The fickle, shallow mob raises its heroes to the pinnacle of approval today and hurls them into oblivion tomorrow at the slightest whim; cheers today, hisses tomorrow; utter forgetfulness in a few months. -- Henry Miller
History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time. -- Henry Miller
The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way. -- Henry Miller
An artist earns the right to call himself a creator only when he admits to himself that he is but an instrument. -- Henry Miller
Suffering is futile, my intelligence told me over and over, but I went on suffering voluntarily. -- Henry Miller
My one thought is to get out of New York, to experience something genuinely American. -- Henry Miller
If you were married to a dipsomaniac, would you pretend that the mania for alcohol was perfectly harmless? -- Henry Miller
They were painfully clean. But inwardly they stank. Never once did they opened the door that leads to the soul; never once did they dream of taking a blind leap into the dark. -- Henry Miller
Voyages are accomplished inwardly. -- Henry Miller
Imagination is the voice of the daring. -- Henry Miller
In every man's heart there is anchored a little schooner. -- Henry Miller
There were lots of words which had fallen out of my vocabulary, living abroad so long. -- Henry Miller
The world of men and women are making merry in the cemetery grounds. They are having sexual intercourse, God bless them, and I am alone in the Land of Fuck. -- Henry Miller
The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting that it was like the flash of a knife. -- Henry Miller
What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature. -- Henry Miller
The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. -- Henry Miller
To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were only capable of staying awake long enough to let the idea soak in. -- Henry Miller
Always a good dodge to simplify your problem by removing it. -- Henry Miller
Everything remains unsettled forever, depend on it -- Henry Miller
The worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfillment instead of an horizon. -- Henry Miller
It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world - it's the American way of looking at things. -- Henry Miller
I shoot hot bolts into you, I make your ovaries incandescent [ ... ] I am fucking you, Tania, so that you'll stay fucked. -- Henry Miller
We ought to remind ourselves daily, repeat it like a litany, that in our being lies concealed the whole gamut of existence ... Above all, we should cease postponing the act of becoming what in fact and essence we are. -- Henry Miller
I was polluting the bed with dreams. -- Henry Miller
I never worried about the genius: genius takes care of the genius in a man. My concern was always for the nobody, the man who is lost in the shuffle, the man who is so common, so ordinary, that his presence is not even noticed. One genius does not inspire another. -- Henry Miller
The legal system is often a mystery, and we, its priests, preside over rituals baffling to everyday citizens. -- Henry Miller
This is the greatest damn thing about the universe. That we can know so much, recognize so much, dissect, do everything, and we can't grasp it. -- Henry Miller
There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy -- Henry Miller
I believe everything you tell me, but I know that it will all turn out differently. -- Henry Miller
No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance. -- Henry Miller
No matter how attached I became to a 'cunt', I was always more interested in the person who owned it. A cunt doesn't live a separate, independent existence. Nothing does. Everything is interrelated. -- Henry Miller
Let me be, was all I wanted. Be what I am, no matter how I am. -- Henry Miller
With every line I write I kill off the "artist" in me. With every line it is either murder in the first degree or suicide. I do not want to give hope to others, nor to inspire others. If we knew what it meant to be inspired we would not inspire. We would simply be. -- Henry Miller
I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything; smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark. -- Henry Miller
Maybe it doesn't make sense but it's my way. I can't navigate any other way -- Henry Miller
The task of genius
is to keep the miracle alive,
to live always in the miracle,
to make the miracle more and more miraculous,
to swear allegiance to nothing,
but live only miraculously,
think only miraculously,
die miraculously. -- Henry Miller
The Frenchman is first and foremost a man. He is likeable often just because of his weaknesses, which are always thoroughly human, even if despicable. -- Henry Miller
There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of our time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. -- Henry Miller
Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It's a sort of spiritual clap, I should say. -- Henry Miller
We have so many points in common that it is like looking at myself in a cracked mirror. -- Henry Miller
They died comfortably in their little bed of understanding, to become useful citizens of the world. I pitied them, and in short order I deserted them one by one, without the slightest regret. -- Henry Miller
We create our fate everyday -- Henry Miller
Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can't wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked. -- Henry Miller
All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. -- Henry Miller
Hitler is no worse, nay better, in my opinion, than the other lugs. He makes the German mistake of being tactless, that's all. -- Henry Miller
Better to separate than never to marry. -- Henry Miller
I like the one about the little soulworms that fly out of the nest for the resurrection. -- Henry Miller
When a desperate, hungry spirit appears and makes the guinea pigs squeal it is because he knows where to put the live wire of sex, because he knows that beneath the hard carapace of indifference there is concealed the ugly gash, the wound that never heals. -- Henry Miller
In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance. -- Henry Miller
Such a healthy, simple, approving glance as if he were saying to himself: "Ah, spring is coming!" And God knows, when spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise. -- Henry Miller
The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order, to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful-thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another. -- Henry Miller
Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement. -- Henry Miller
We need good titles. -- Henry Miller
If you elect to join the herd you are immune. To be accepted and appreciated you must nullify yourself, make yourself indistinguishable from the herd. You may dream, if you dream alike. -- Henry Miller
It's good to be just plain happy, it's a little better to know that you're happy; but to understand that you're happy and to know why and how and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss. -- Henry Miller
We are dancing in the hollow of nothingness. We are one flesh, but separated like stars. -- Henry Miller
Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything except his own nature. -- Henry Miller
There's only one good aspect to it," says Joe. "You may get his job. And if you have any luck, maybe you'll fall down the elevator shaft and break your neck too. We'll buy you a nice wreath, I promise you that. -- Henry Miller
Yeah, I picked up a book and I read. You can get something out of a book, even a bad book ... but a cunt, it's just sheer loss of time ... -- Henry Miller
For the moment I can think of nothing - except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world. -- Henry Miller
I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions. -- Henry Miller
There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him. -- Henry Miller
I was lonely amidst a world of things lit up by phosphorescent flashes of cruelty. I was delirious with an energy which could not be unleashed except in the service of death and futility. -- Henry Miller
The disorientation and reorientation which comes with the initiation into any mystery is the most wonderful experience which is possible to have. -- Henry Miller
The sun is setting fast. The colors die. They shift from purple to dried blood, from nacre to bister, from cool dead grays to pigeon shit. -- Henry Miller
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. -- Henry Miller
There is no fundamental, unalterable difference between things: all is flux, all is perishable. The surface of your being is constantly crumbling; within however you grow hard as a diamond. And perhaps it is this hard, magnetic core inside you which attracts others to you willy-nilly. -- Henry Miller
When you get an erection you think you're passionate. -- Henry Miller
All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience. -- Henry Miller
They never opened the door which leads to the soul. -- Henry Miller
I expected so much, so much of the world and it all fell short. -- Henry Miller
The cradles of civilization are the putrid sinks of the world. -- Henry Miller
Man will change nothing of his final destiny, which is to return sooner or later to the unconscious and the formless. -- Henry Miller
Let us do our best, even if it gets us nowhere. -- Henry Miller
Night has fallen. I'm no longer hungry. I have only an insane desire to be happy. That means I want to share my intoxication with you and everybody. That is maudlin. -- Henry Miller
In Europe one gets used to doing nothing. You sit on your ass and whine all day. You get contaminated. You rot. -- Henry Miller
Each man has his own way of being himself and of saying it so ultimately that he can't be denied. -- Henry Miller
Plots and character don't make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip. -- Henry Miller
A child has no need to write, he is innocent. A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. -- Henry Miller
The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. -- Henry Miller
Everybody is giving birth to something - everybody but the lesbian in the upper tier. Her head is uptilted, her throat wide open; she is all alert and tingling with the shower of sparks that burst from the radium symphony. Jupiter is piercing her ears. -- Henry Miller
The kangaroo has a double penis - one for week days and one for holidays. -- Henry Miller
Our world is rapidly drawing to a close; a new one is about to open. If it is to flourish it will have to rest on deeds as well as faith. The word will have to become flesh. -- Henry Miller
The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life. -- Henry Miller
Better a good venereal disease than a moribund peace and quiet. -- Henry Miller
Do not be duped by little duties. Do not be a chore man all your days. -- Henry Miller
One of the reasons why so few of us ever act, instead of react, is because we are continually stifling our deepest impulses. -- Henry Miller
There's something depraved about screwing a woman who doesn't give a fuck about it. It heats your blood ... " And then, after a moment's meditation - "Can you imagine what she'd be like if she had any feelings? -- Henry Miller
Writing is its own reward. -- Henry Miller
Man, as man, has never realized himself. The greater part of him, his potential being, has always been submerged. What is history if not the endless story of his repeated failures? -- Henry Miller
Don't look away. Look straight at everything. Look it all in the eye, good and bad. -- Henry Miller
We came together in a dance of death and so quickly was I sucked down into the vortex that when I came to the surface again I couldn't recognize the world. When I found myself loose the music had ceased; the carnival was over and I had been picked clean. -- Henry Miller
The vast difference between astrology and other sciences, if I may put it thus, is that astrology deals not with facts but with profundities. The solid ground on which the scientist pretends to rest gives way, in astrology, to imponderables. -- Henry Miller
When you meet the man [Brassai] you see at once that he is equipped with no ordinary eyes. And the sharpness of vision and depth of insight are revealed in Brassai's lifelong photographic exploration of Paris - its people, places, and things. -- Henry Miller
The more I wrote, the more I became a human being. The writing may have seemed monstrous (to some) for it was a violation, but I became a more human individual because of it. I was getting the poison out of my system. -- Henry Miller
The trouble with Irene is that she has a valise instead of a cunt. She wants
fat letters to shove in her valise. -- Henry Miller
A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold. -- Henry Miller
The most wonderful opportunity which life offers is to be human. -- Henry Miller
Prayers are offered up daily - without charge ... Refreshments are served when demanded. -- Henry Miller
The most difficult thing to adjust to, apparently, is peace and contentment. -- Henry Miller
The real enemy can always be met and conquered, or won over. Real antagonism is based on love, a love which has not recognized itself. -- Henry Miller
Through endless night the earth whirls toward a creation unknown ... -- Henry Miller
Next to love friendship, in my opinion, is the most valuable thing life has to offer. -- Henry Miller
What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse. -- Henry Miller
Even if it doesn't work, there is something healthy and invigorating about direct action -- Henry Miller
To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing. -- Henry Miller
There is something else to be said about this immediate, spontaneous way of working, and that is this: in such moments, one is playing at the game of creation. -- Henry Miller
Without a Coca-Cola life is unthinkable. -- Henry Miller
You have to die a human being to be reborn an individual. -- Henry Miller
We create our fate every day ... most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior. -- Henry Miller
Who wants to be a hundred? What's the point of it? A short life and a merry one is far better than a long one sustained by fear, caution, and perpetual medical surveillance. -- Henry Miller
I'd rather sit down and write a letter than call someone up. I hate the telephone. -- Henry Miller
When you travel often, you will be addicted to it forever. -- Henry Miller
We live at the edge of the miraculous. -- Henry Miller
In the ultimate sense, the world itself is pregnant with failure, is the perfect manifestation of imperfection, of the consciousness of failure. In the realization of this, failure is itself eliminated. -- Henry Miller
I don't know which affected me more deeply - the story of the lemon groves just opposite us or the sight of Poros itself when suddenly I realized that we were sailing through the streets. If there is one dream which I like above all others it is that of sailing on land. -- Henry Miller
Life's wildest moment
she kneels on the sidewalk. Everything else she does is lies, lies. -- Henry Miller
Sin, guilt, neurosis; they are one and the same, the fruit of the tree of knowledge. -- Henry Miller
The full and joyful acceptance of the worst in oneself may be the only sure way of transforming it. -- Henry Miller
No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe. -- Henry Miller
If I am against the condition of the world, it is not because I am a moralist - it is because I want to laugh more. -- Henry Miller
Your nearness is the nearness of planets. I am the void between you. If I withdraw there will be no void for you to swim in. -- Henry Miller
I was alive. But I was alive without a memory, without a name; I was cut off from hope as well as from remorse or regret. I had no past and would probably have no future; I was buried alive in a void which was the wound that had been dealt me. I was like the wound itself. -- Henry Miller
The truly great writer does not want to write. He wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. -- Henry Miller
In the four hundred years since the last devouring soul appeared; the last man to know the meaning of ecstasy, there has been a constant and steady decline of man in art, in thought, in action. The world is pooped out: there isn't a dry fart left. -- Henry Miller
Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing: it comes and goes. But if one believes, then miracles occur. -- Henry Miller
But there was a streak in me, a perverse one, which prevented me from giving the essential self. This "perversity" always voiced itself thus: "Reveal your true self and they will mutilate you. -- Henry Miller
To be cured, we must rise from our graves and throw off the cerements of the dead. Nobody can do it for another - it is a private affair which is best done collectively. We must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separated and self-hypnotized, but individual and related. -- Henry Miller
Every day that we fail to live out the maximum of our potentialities we kill the Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Christ which is in us. -- Henry Miller
Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so. You no longer believe in reality but in thinking. And when you are pushed off the dead end your thoughts go with you and they are of no use to you. -- Henry Miller
America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit. He -- Henry Miller
No, we are never alone. But one has to live apart to know it for the truth. -- Henry Miller
Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything godlike about God, it is that. He dared to imagine everything -- Henry Miller
I would like to suffocate with grief but instead I give birth to a rock. -- Henry Miller
For one crime which is expiated in prison ten thousand are committed thoughtlessly by those who condemn. -- Henry Miller
He saw that it wasn't just a circus, but an arena, just like everywhere. -- Henry Miller
To know Paris is to know a great deal. -- Henry Miller
Art consists in going the full length. If you start with the drums you have to end with dynamite, or TNT. -- Henry Miller
Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning. -- Henry Miller
Well, fuck a duck. -- Henry Miller
A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there - that of the pulse, the heart beat. -- Henry Miller
True strength lies in submission which permits one to dedicate his life, through devotion, to something beyond himself. -- Henry Miller
Words are loneliness. -- Henry Miller
To imagine a new world is to live it daily, each thought, each glance, each step, each gesture, killing and recreating, death always a step in advance. To spit on the past is not enough. To proclaim the future is not enough. One must act as if the past were dead and the future unrealizable. -- Henry Miller
The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary. -- Henry Miller
We should not stop to reflect, compare, analyze, possess, but flow on and through, endlessly, like music. -- Henry Miller
I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live - if what others are doing is called living - but to express myself. -- Henry Miller
We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate. -- Henry Miller
The cancer of time is eating us away -- Henry Miller
He falls on her lap and lies there quivering like a toothache -- Henry Miller
Actors die so loud. -- Henry Miller
The learning we received only tended to obscure our vision. From the day we went to school we learned nothing; on the contrary, we were made obtuse, we were wrapped in a fog of words and abstractions. -- Henry Miller
Unless the nightmare is strong enough to wake you up you go right on retreating, and either you end up on a bench or you end up as vice-president. It's all one and the same, a bloody fucking mess, a farce, a fiasco from start to finish. -- Henry Miller
Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed. -- Henry Miller
The piano bar is the gateway to the halls of masturbation. -- Henry Miller
Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing. -- Henry Miller
Everything is endured - disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui - in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. -- Henry Miller
The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive. -- Henry Miller
Perhaps I have not lined his portrait too clearly. But if he exists, if only for the reason that I have imagined him to be. He came from the blue and returns to the blue. He has not perished, he is not lost. Neither will he be forgotten. -- Henry Miller
I'm delirious because I'm dying so fast. -- Henry Miller
One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things. -- Henry Miller
Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy. -- Henry Miller
When you can't create, you can work -- Henry Miller
Chaos is the score upon which reality is written. -- Henry Miller
I feel that America is essentially against the artist, that the enemy of America is the artist, because he stands for individuality and creativeness, and that's un-American somehow. -- Henry Miller
The frantic desire to live, to live at any cost, is not a result of the life rhythm in us, but of the death rhythm. -- Henry Miller
Greece is the home of the gods; they may have died but their presence still makes itself felt. The gods were of human proportion: they were created out of the human spirit. -- Henry Miller
The imperfections of a man, his frailties, his faults, are just as important as his virtues. You can't separate them. They're wedded. -- Henry Miller
When shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes. -- Henry Miller
Somewhere along the way one discovers that what one has to tell is not nearly so important as the telling itself. -- Henry Miller
What is an artist? He's a man who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to the currents which are in atmosphere, in the cosmos. -- Henry Miller
What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their ability to act according to their beliefs. -- Henry Miller
When a situation gets so bad that no solution seems possible there is left only murder and suicide, or both. These failing, one becomes a buffoon. -- Henry Miller
Why change the world? Change worlds! -- Henry Miller
If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without. -- Henry Miller
We are all alone here and we are dead. -- Henry Miller
I will sing while you croak. -- Henry Miller
Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire. -- Henry Miller
Serenity is when you get above all this, when it doesn't matter what they think, say or want, but when you do as you are, and see God and Devil as one. -- Henry Miller
What's a fuck when what I want is love? -- Henry Miller
I am of the order whose purpose is not to teach the world a lesson but to explain that school is over. -- Henry Miller
Who hates the Jews more than the Jew? -- Henry Miller
I saw the errors I had made and assumed full responsibility for everything. -- Henry Miller
He read as much as his curiosity demanded - which is to say all -- Henry Miller
Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant -- Henry Miller
Art is only a means to life, the life more abundant. It merely points the way. -- Henry Miller
Life becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show. -- Henry Miller
I remember that just as I was about to cross the border they asked me what I had to declare and, like an idiot, I answered: I want to declare that I am a traitor to the human race. -- Henry Miller
Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern. -- Henry Miller
Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring. -- Henry Miller
