|
db75399
|
The ovarian world is the product of a life rhythm. The moment a child is born it becomes part of a world in which there is not only the life rhythm but the death rhythm. 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. There is not only no need to keep alive at any price, but, if life is undesirable, it is absolutely wrong. This keeping oneself alive, out of a blind urge to ..
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
d7976cf
|
The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses.
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
d949f5c
|
I was born the 26th of December. . . Arrive by dint of perseverance, but step by step. . . Tenancy to exaggerate the importance of earthly life. Avaricious of self. Constant in their affections and their hatreds. . . Yes, the Capricorn is a beast of solitude. Slow, steady, and persevering. Lives on several levels at once. Thinks in circles. Fascinated by death. Ever climbing, climbing. In search of the edelweiss, presumably. Or could it be ..
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
d801693
|
I didn't dare to think of anything then except the "facts." To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn't become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual. You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self. Yo..
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
2e6a0ab
|
I 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.... 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. It is to you, Tania, that I am singing. I wish that I could sing bett..
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
6b6cfb6
|
At that moment I rejoiced that I was free of possessions, free of all*ties, free of fear and envy and malice. I could have passed quietly from one dream to another, owning nothing, regretting nothing, wishing nothing. I was never more certain that life and death are one and that neither can be enjoyed or embraced if the other be absent.
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
c7824be
|
I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
05b9b79
|
Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no es..
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
42e7889
|
To imagine a new world is to live it daily, each thought, each glance, each step, each gesture killing and re-creating, 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. One must act as if the next step were the last, which it is. Each step forward is the last, and with it a world dies, one's self included. We are here o..
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
2babe36
|
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 |
|
6cf5b3e
|
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 |
|
69ff19e
|
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 |
|
1d26233
|
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 |
|
245a52f
|
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 |
|
1910f69
|
Today I awoke from a sound sleep with curses of joy on my lips, with gibberish on my tongue, repeating to myself like a litany - "Fay ce que vouldras!... fay ce que vouldras!"; Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy. So much crowds into my head when I say this to myself: images, gay ones, terrible ones, maddening ones, the wolf and the goat, the spider, the crab, syphilis with her wings outstretched and t..
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
2463e01
|
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 |
|
fa70911
|
To 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 trul..
|
|
imagination
living-to-the-full
|
Henry Miller |
|
aca7fb2
|
Standing in the courtyard with a glass eye; only half the world is intelligible. The stones are wet and mossy and in the crevices are black toads. A big door bars the entrance to the cellar; the steps are slippery and soiled with bat dung. The door bulges and sags, the hinges are falling off, but there is an enameled sign on it, in perfect condition, which says: "Be sure to close the door." Why close the door? I can't make it out. I look ag..
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
dd72a2e
|
The dreamers dream from the neck up, their bodies securely strapped to the electric chair. 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. One must act as if the next step were the last, which it is. E..
|
|
|
henry miller |
|
f68ea23
|
Every time I pass the concierge's window and catch the full icy impact of her glance I have an insane desire to throttle all the birds in creation. At the bottom of every frozen heart there is a drop or two of love - just enough to feed the birds.
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
2b3f855
|
If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on [. . .]If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger tha..
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
5ad92a3
|
If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea. 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 cand..
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
8068697
|
Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity-I belong to the earth!
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
b0cf942
|
I have never found such a man! I have never found a man as generous as myself, as forgiving, as tolerant, as carefree, as reckless, as clean at heart. I forgive myself for every crime I have committed. I do it in the name of humanity. I know what it means to be human, the weakness and the strength of it. I suffer from this knowledge and I revel in it also. If I had the chance to be God I would reject it. If I had the chance to be a star I w..
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
eaca0ad
|
The 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.
|
|
time
silence
reality
music
tropic-of-cancer
henry-miller
chaos
reality-of-life
|
Henry Miller |
|
08a5db8
|
One can see now how the idea of heaven takes hold of men's consciousness, how it gains ground even when all the props have been knocked from under it. There must be another world beside this swamp in which everything is dumped pell-mell. It's hard to imagine what it can be like, this heaven that men dream about.
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
059536f
|
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,
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
bdb1394
|
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 |
|
1b2d695
|
No matter what you touch and you wish to know about, you end up in a sea of mystery. You see there's no beginning or end, you can go back as far as you want, forward as far as you want, but you never got to it, it's like the essence, it's that right, it remains. 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. And it's meant to be that way, do y'k..
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
7f89934
|
In the beginning was the Word... Whatever this was, the Word, disease or creation, it was still running rampant; it would run on and on, outstrip time and space, outlast the angels, unseat God, unhook the universe. Any word contained all words - for him who had become detached through love or sorrow or whatever the cause. In every word the current ran back to the beginning which was lost and which would never be found again since there was ..
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
f950901
|
Estoy muerto espiritualmente. Fisicamente, estoy vivo. Moralmente, soy libre.
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
cc55c2b
|
I couldn't allow myself to think about her very long; if I had I would have jumped off the bridge. It's strange. I had become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I thought about her only for a minute it was enough to pierce the bone and marrow of my contentment and shove me hack again into the agonizing gutter of my wretched past.
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
d12d77c
|
Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths.
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
e38a506
|
I am fucking you, Tania, so that you'll stay fucked.
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
e42ef7d
|
And no one sets about saving the world unless he has first experienced the miracle of personal salvation.
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
8aa6520
|
yjb 'n 'jls hn fHsb, l~ 'n ykhym llyl. Hyn yTl` lqmr kl shyin sykwn fy mknh.
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
9a7d1fe
|
I had the misfortune to be nourished by the dreams and visions of great Americans -- the poets and seers. Some other breed of man has won out. This world which is in the making fills me with dread. I have seen it germinate; I can read it like a blueprint. It is not a world I want to live in. It is a world suited for monomaniacs obsessed with the idea of progress -- but a false progress, a progress which stinks. It is a world cluttered with ..
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
269f301
|
ydhmn ly's fntHwl l~ lktb, wnD` thqtt fy lmw'lfyn, fnlj' l~ l'Hlm.
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
481bd9a
|
For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off.
|
|
|
Henry Miller |
|
ecbaf15
|
Tomorrow 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.
|
|
writing
inspirational
|
Henry Miller |
|
f8412c6
|
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 |
|
e9b7ec2
|
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 |
|
a8c7882
|
A 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 dropped your 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 lie..
|
|
sex
women
desire
|
Henry Miller |
|
1b951d1
|
Fear, hydra-headed fear, which is rampant in all of us, is a hang-over from lower forms of life. We are straddling two worlds, the one from which we have emerged and the one towards which we are heading. This is the deepest meaning of the word human, that we are a link, a bridge, a promise. It is in us that the life process is being carried to fulfillment. We have a tremendous responsibility, and it is the gravity of that which awakens our ..
|
|
|
Henry Miller |