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b540bac
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A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.
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power
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Henry Miller |
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797d203
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Let me be, was all I wanted. Be what I am, no matter how I am.
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Henry Miller |
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941a37a
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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.
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solitude
silence
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Henry Miller |
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f20eab9
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Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who ..
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inspirational
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Henry Miller |
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f1ebe01
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Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.
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Henry Miller |
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e7dc2f9
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Anais, I don't know how to tell you what I feel. I live in perpetual expectancy. You come and the time slips away in a dream. It is only when you go that I realize completely your presence. And then it is too late. You numb me. [...] This is a little drunken, Anais. I am saying to myself "here is the first woman with whom I can be absolutely sincere." I remember your saying - "you could fool me, I wouldn't know it." When I walk along the bo..
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Henry Miller |
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8cade31
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Anais, I don't know how to tell you what I feel. I live in perpetual expectancy. You come and the time slips away in a dream. It is only when you go that I realize completely your presence. And then it is too late. You numb me. [...] This is a little drunken, Anais. I am saying to myself "here is the first woman with whom I can be absolutely sincere." I remember your saying - "you could fool me, I wouldn't know it." When I walk along the bo..
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Henry Miller |
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f1a3114
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I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous [person], the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the [person] in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.
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free-thinker
beatnik
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Henry Miller |
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92b1c7a
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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.
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life
inspirational
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Henry Miller |
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5ac4a54
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To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth--I count that something of a miracle.
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sexuality
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Henry Miller |
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e64640a
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I want to undress you, vulgarize you a bit.
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Henry Miller |
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5c01ba7
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A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation... 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.
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reading
friends
learning
sharing-books
sharing
reading-books
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Henry Miller |
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04b41fa
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I have found God, but he is insufficient.
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religion
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Henry Miller |
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fc56859
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And for that one moment of freedom you have to listen to all that love crap... it drive me nuts sometimes... I want to kick them out immediately... I do now and then. But that doesn't keep them away. They like it, in fact. The less you notice them the more they chase after you. There's something perverse about women... they're all masochists at heart.
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relationships
women
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Henry Miller |
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dcd0610
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Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything godlike about God, it is that. He dared to imagine everything
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imagination
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Henry Miller |
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e5d3a1f
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Words are loneliness.
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words
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Henry Miller |
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ec46126
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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.
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words
literature
reading
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Henry Miller |
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6db80d8
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Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy.
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Henry Miller |
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40dc99a
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I'm an egotist, but I'm not selfish. There's a difference. I'm a neurotic, I guess. I can't stop thinking about myself. It isn't that I think myself so important... I simply can't think about anything else, that's all. If I could fall in love with a woman that might help some. But I can't find a woman who interests me.
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Henry Miller |
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6ffc711
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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!
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Henry Miller |
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d18be8f
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When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it,or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance. I am very certain now that, as I said therein, if I truly become what I wish to be, the burden will fall away. The most difficult thing to admit, and to realize with one's whole being, is that you alone control nothing.
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Henry Miller |
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fec81ea
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She rises up out of a sea of faces and embraces me, embraces me passionately--- a thousand eyes, noses, fingers, legs, bottles, windows, purses, saucers all glaring at us an we in each other's arm oblivious. I sit down beside her and she talks--- a flood of talk. Wild consumptive notes of hysteria, perversion, leprosy. I hear not a word because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy and willing to die.
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Henry Miller |
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106aa5f
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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.
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Henry Miller |
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4a1010c
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If I were reading a book and happened to strike a wonderful passage I would close the book then and there and go for a walk. I hated the thought of coming to the end of a good book. I would tease it along, delay the inevitable as long as possible, But always, when I hit a great passage, I would stop reading immediately. Out I would go, rain, hail, snow or ice, and chew the cud.
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Henry Miller |
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2131370
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Nothing can be given or taken away; nothing has been added or subtracted; nothing increased or diminished. We stand on the same shore before the same mighty ocean. The ocean of love. There it is - in perpetuum. As much in a broken blossom, the sound of a waterfall, the swoop of a carrion bird as in the thunderous artillery of the prophet.
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Henry Miller |
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1a11e52
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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.
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Henry Miller |
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e65c2f1
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I made up my mind that I would hold onto nothing, that I would expect nothing.
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Henry Miller |
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cade7b7
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I'm a bit retarded, like most Americans.
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Henry Miller |
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019105b
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At the bottom of every frozen heart there is a drop or two of love--just enough to feed the birds.
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Henry Miller |
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05b1f3b
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The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.
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Henry Miller |
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3255790
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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.
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Henry Miller |
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16e0f6d
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An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
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Henry Miller |
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ff9abd2
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On the meridian of time, there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama.
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Henry Miller |
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1d9d5e6
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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.
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tropic-of-capricorn
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Henry Miller |
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3620fe1
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You must be life for me to the very end," so he writes. "That is the only way in which to sustain my idea of you. Because you have gotten, as you see, tied up with something so vital to me, I do not think I shall ever shake you off. Nor do I wish to. I want you to live more vitally every day, as I am dead. That is why, when I speak of you to others, I am just a bit ashamed. It's hard to talk of one's self so intimately"
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Henry Miller |
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fe171e5
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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.
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Henry Miller |
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2329643
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Life's wildest moment---she kneels on the sidewalk. Everything else she does is lies, lies.
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truth
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Henry Miller |
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593cfca
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I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with it's painful gall-stones, it's gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul...
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Henry Miller |
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6714faf
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1) Work on one thing at a time until finished. 2) Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring." 3) Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand. 4) Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time! 5) When you can't create you can work. 6) Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers. 7) Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like..
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writing
anais-nin
rules
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Henry Miller |
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045b7e3
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Conditioned to ecstasy, the poet is like a gorgeous unknown bird mired in the ashes of thought. If he succeeds in freeing himself, it is to make a sacrificial flight to the sun. His dreams of a regenerate world are but the reverberations of his own fevered pulse beats. He imagines the world will follow him, but in the blue he finds himself alone. Alone but surrounded by his creations; sustained, therefore, to meet the supreme sacrifice. The..
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henry-miller
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Henry Miller |
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d7856a7
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Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become that path himself. "I began in absolute chaos and darkness, in a bog or swamp of ideas and emotions and experiences. Even now I do not consider..
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Henry Miller |
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5987253
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When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or sorrow, it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand.
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Henry Miller |
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dc4b614
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A good meal, a good talk, a good fuck--what better way to pass the day?
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Henry Miller |
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b18a61a
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I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had s..
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candlelight
yawn
desires
leviathan
caves
reflect
metamorphosis
forget
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Henry Miller |