Quotes from Henry Miller

When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written.

The ideal community, in a sense, would be the loose, fluid aggregation of individuals who elected to be alone and detached in order to be at one with themselves and all that lives and breathes. It would be a God-filled community, even if none of its members believe in (a) God. It would be a paradise, even though the word had long disappeared from our vocabulary.

Deep in the blood the pull of paradise. The beyond. It must have all started with the navel. They cut the umbilical cord, give you a slap in the ass, and presto! you're out in the world, adrift. You look at the stars and then you look at your navel. You grow eyes everywhere -in the armpits, between the lips, in the roots of your hair, on the soles of your feet. What is distant becomes near, what is near becomes distant. Inner-outer, a constant flux, a shedding of skins, a turning inside out.

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.

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.

I am a man of the old world, a seed that was transplanted by the wind, a seed which failed to blossom in the mushroom oasis of America. I belong on the heavy tree of the past. My allegiance, physical and spiritual, it is with the men of Europe, those who were once Franks, Gauls, Vikings, Huns, Tatars, what not. The climate for my body and soul is here where there is quickness and corruption. I am proud not to belong in this century.

It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance! - Tropic of Cancer

In Europe one gets used to doing nothing. You sit on your ass and whine all day. You get contaminated. You rot.

There are people who cannot resist the desire to get into a cage with wild beasts and be mangled.

What most people fear when they think of old age is the inability to make new friends. If one ever had the faculty of making friends one never loses it however old one grows. Next to love friendship, in my opinion, is the most valuable thing life has to offer.

Se sou inumano é porque meu mundo transbordou de suas fronteiras humanas, porque ser humano parece uma coisa pobre, triste, miserável, limitada pelos sentidos, restringida pelas moralidades e pelos códigos, definida pelos lugares-comuns e 'ismos'. (Trópico de Câncer)

For the man in the paddock, whose duty is is to sweep up manure, the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses. To tell him that it is disgusting to spend one's life shoveling up hot turds is a piece of imbecility. A man can get to love shit if his livelihood depends on it, if his happiness is involved.

Maybe I only thought I was in love. Maybe I was simply hungry, lonely, a clay pigeon any one could put away with a toy pistol.

Every man has his own destiny;the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him

Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, to discover what is already there.

They had skies of pure azure and walls of fog moving in and out of the canyons with invisible feet, hills in winter of emerald green and in summer mountain upon mountain of pure gold. They had even more, for there was ever the unfathomable silence of the forest, the blazing immensity of the Pacific, days drenched with sun and nights spangled with stars. . .

At the opera, the music makes no sense; here in the street it has just the right demented touch to give it poignancy.

as Sylvester says, a man who has never been afflicted with a neurosis does not know the meaning of suffering.

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 chose. What stays him, usually, is the fear of the sacrifices involved. (Even to relinquish his chains seems like a sacrifice.) Yet everyone knows that nothing is accomplished without sacrifice.

The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can life the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.

ja znam da sloboda zna?i odgovornost.isto tako znam kako se lako želja može pretvoriti u ?in. ?ak i kad sklopim o?i, moram paziti kako sanjam i o ?emu, jer samo najtanji veo deli tada san od jave.

I saw the errors I had made and assumed full responsibility for everything.

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.

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.