01c. 1935 ADSex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportantHenry Miller / quote ↗
03c. 1935 ADAnd 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 / quote ↗
04c. 1935 ADliterature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed.Henry Miller / quote ↗
05c. 1935 ADTo 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 / quote ↗
06c. 1935 ADBuild your cities proud and high. Lay your sewers. Span your rivers. Work feverishly. Sleep dreamlessly. Sing madly, like the bulbul. Underneath, below the deepest foundations, there lives another race of men. They are dark, sombre, passionate. They muscle into the bowels of the earth. They wait with a patience which is terrifying. They are the scavengers. They emerge when everything topples into dust.Henry Miller / quote ↗
07c. 1935 ADWhat I secretly longed for was to disentangle myself of all those lives which had woven themselves into the pattern of my own life and were making my destiny a part of theirs. To shake myself free of these accumulating experiences which were mine only by force of inertia required a violent effort. Now and then I lunged and tore at the net, but only to become more enmeshed. My liberation seemed to involve pain and suffering to those near and dear to me. Every move I made for my own private good brought about reproach and condemnation. I was a traitor a thousand times over.Henry Miller / quote ↗
08c. 1935 ADIt 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 / quote ↗
09c. 1935 ADEveryman has his own destiny: The only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him.Henry Miller / quote ↗
10c. 1935 ADThere 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 / quote ↗
11c. 1935 ADUp 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 / quote ↗
12c. 1935 ADThis was the sort of ebullience and élan I prayed for when I felt the desire to write. I used to sit down and wait for this to happen. But it never did happen- not this way. It happened afterwards, sometimes when I had left the machine and gone for a walk. Yes, suddenly it would come on, like an attack, pell-mell, from every direction, a veritable inundation, an avalanche- and there I was, helpless, miles away from the typewriter, not a piece of paper in my pocket.Henry Miller / quote ↗
13c. 1935 ADTomorrow is no hazardous affair, a day like any other day: tomorrow is the result of many yesterdays and comes with a potent, cumulative effect. I am tomorrow what I chose to be yesterday and the day before. It is not possible that tomorrow I may negate and nullify everything that led me to this present moment.Henry Miller / quote ↗
15c. 1935 ADNo 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 / quote ↗
17c. 1935 ADI wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think.Henry Miller / quote ↗
18c. 1935 ADPassing beneath the dance hall, thinking again of this book, I realized suddenly that our life had come to an end: I realized that the book I was planning was nothing more than a tomb in which to bury her - and the me which had belonged to her. That was some time ago, and ever since I have been trying to write it. Why is it so difficult? Why? Because the idea of an "end" is intolerable to me.Henry Miller / quote ↗
19c. 1935 ADTomorrow you may bring about the destruction of your world. Tomorrow you may sing in Paradise above the smoking ruins of your world-cities. But tonight I would like to think of one man, a lone individual, a man without name or country, a man whom I respect because he has absolutely nothing in common with you - MYSELF. Tonight I shall meditate upon that which I am.Henry Miller / quote ↗
20c. 1935 ADTo move forward clinging to the past is like dragging a ball and chain. The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over. We are all guilty of crime, the great crime of not living life to the full. But we are all potentially free. We can stop thinking of what we have failed to do and do whatever lies within our power. What these powers that are in us may be no one has truly dared to imagine. That they are infinite we will realize the day we admit to ourselves that imagination is everything. Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything God-like about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.Henry Miller / quote ↗
21c. 1935 ADEvery time you come to the limit of what is demanded of you, you are faced with the same problem-to be yourself!Henry Miller / quote ↗
22c. 1935 ADOne's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.Henry Miller / quote ↗
23c. 1935 ADWe are accustomed to think of ourselves as a great democratic body, linked by common ties of blood and language, united indissolubly by all the modes of communication which the ingenuity of man can possibly devise; we wear the same clothes, eat the same diet, read the same newspapers, alike in everything but name, weight and number; we are the most collectivized people in the world, barring certain primitive peoples whom we consider backward in their development. And yet— yet despite all the outward evidences of being close-knit, interrelated, neighborly, good−humored, helpful, sympathetic, almost brotherly, we are a lonely people, a morbid, crazed herd thrashing about in zealous frenzy, trying to forget that we are not what we think we are, not really united, not really devoted to one another, not really listening, not really anything, just digits shuffled about by some unseen hand in a calculation which doesn't concern us.Henry Miller / quote ↗
24c. 1935 ADHe’s like a hero come back from thewar, a poor maimed bastard living out the reality of his dreams.Wherever he sits himself the chair collapses; whatever door heenters the room is empty: whatever he puts in his mouth leaves abad taste. Everything is just the same as it was before; theelements are unchanged, the dream is no different than the reality.Only, between the time he went to sleep and the time he woke up,his body was stolen.Henry Miller / quote ↗
