01c. 1935 ADEvery day the choice is presented to us, in a thousand different ways, to live up to the spirit which is in us or to deny it. Whenever we talk about right and wrong we are turning the light of scrutiny upon our neighbors instead of upon ourselves. We judge in order not to be judged. We uphold the law, because it is easier than to defy it. We are all lawbreakers, all criminals, all murderers, at heart. It is not our business to get after the murderers, but to get after the murderer which exists in each and every one of us. And I mean by murder the supreme kind which consists in murdering the spirit.Henry Miller / quote ↗
02c. 1935 ADWhen 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 / quote ↗
03c. 1935 ADThere are those of poor spirit and there are those of great spirit. None are without it but the flame flickers pretty low in some cases. The majority of people seem to be nothing but a little flickering flame. You know that when you match them against an individual who is all fire, all radiance. Those in whom the flame of the spirit runs high are extraordinary examples of human beings.Henry Miller / quote ↗
04c. 1935 ADCrime begins with God. It will end with man, when he finds God again. Crime is everywhere, in all the fibres and roots of our being. Every minute of the day adds fresh crimes to the calendar, both those which are detected and punished, and those which are not. The criminal hunts down the criminal. The judge condemns the judger. The innocent torture the innocent. Everywhere, in every family, every tribe, every great community, crimes, crimes, crimes. War is clean by comparison. The hangman is a gentle dove by comparison. Attila, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan reckless automatons by comparison. Your father, your darling mother, your sweet sister: do you know the foul crimes they harbor in their breasts? Can you hold the mirror to iniquity when it is close at hand? Have you looked into the labyrinth of your own despicable heart? Have you sometimes envied the thug for his forthrightness? The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you. The source of it is God whom you place outside, above and beyond. Crime is identification, first with God, then with your own image.Henry Miller / quote ↗
05c. 1935 ADA valise without straps. A hole without a key. She had a German mouth, French ears, Russian ass. Cunt international. When the flag waved it was red all the way back to the throat. You entered on the Boulevard Jules-Ferry and came out at the Porte de la Villette. You droppedyour sweetbreads into the tumbrils – red tumbrils with two wheels, naturally. At the confluence of the Ourcq and Marne, where the water sluices through the dikes and lies like glass under thebridges.Henry Miller / quote ↗
06c. 1935 ADWe create our fate every day . . . most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.Henry Miller / quote ↗
07c. 1935 ADEven if it doesn't work, there is something healthy and invigorating about direct actionHenry Miller / quote ↗
08c. 1935 ADI 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 / quote ↗
09c. 1935 ADThe world is a cancer eating itself away... I am think that when the great silence descends upon all and everywhere music will at last triumph. When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written.Henry Miller / quote ↗
10c. 1935 ADWe have scholars galore, and kings and emperors, and statesmen and military leaders, and artists in profusion, and inventors, discoverers, explorers - but where are the great lovers? After a moment's reflection one is back to Abelard and Heloise, or Anthony and Cleopatra, or the story of the Taj Mahal. So much of it is fictive, expanded and glorified by the poverty-stricken lovers whose prayers are answered only by myth and legend.Henry Miller / quote ↗
11c. 1935 ADOne's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking things.Henry Miller / quote ↗
12c. 1935 ADIf we are always arriving and departing, it is alsotrue that we are eternally anchored. One's destinationis never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.Henry Miller / quote ↗
13c. 1935 ADWhen shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes.Henry Miller / quote ↗
14c. 1935 ADThe world around me is dissolving leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away.Henry Miller / quote ↗
15c. 1935 ADOne is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy; the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be so. Each one is traveling his own way and, though the earth be rotting with good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there, such a sweat to escape, that the weak and the helpless are trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard.Henry Miller / quote ↗
16c. 1935 ADIf this was the true self it was marvelous and what’s more it seemed never to change but always to pick up from the last stop, to continue in the same vein, a vein I had struck when I was a child and went down in the street for the first time alone and there frozen into the dirty ice of the gutter lay a dead cat, the first time I had looked at death and grasped it. From that moment I knew what it was to be isolated: every object, every living thing and every dead thing led its independent existence. My thoughts too led to an independent existence.Henry Miller / quote ↗
17c. 1935 ADIt's best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it's always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled....It doesn't exist, America. It's a name you give to an abstract idea.Henry Miller / quote ↗
18c. 1935 ADIt’s best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it’s always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cows and sheep and tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman or beast. It doesn’t exist, America. It’s a name you give to an abstract idea…Henry Miller / quote ↗
19c. 1935 ADWe defend with our lives the petty principles which divide us. The common principle, which is the establishment of the empire of man on earth, we never lift a finger to defend. We are frightened of any urge which would lift us out of the muck. We fight only for the status quo, our particular status quo. We battle with heads down and eyes closed.Henry Miller / quote ↗
20c. 1935 ADI am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse.Henry Miller / quote ↗
21c. 1935 ADFor the man in the paddock, whose duty is is to sweep up manure,the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses. Totell him that it is disgusting to spend one’s life shoveling up hotturds is a piece of imbecility. A man can get to love shit if hislivelihood depends on it, if his happiness is involved.Henry Miller / quote ↗
22c. 1935 ADA beautiful nap this afternoon that put velvet between my vertebrae.Henry Miller / quote ↗
23c. 1935 ADIt is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.Henry Miller / quote ↗
24c. 1935 ADI saw the errors I had made and assumed full responsibility for everything.Henry Miller / quote ↗
