Quotes from Henry Miller

In vacuum one has no need for new things, nor of excitement, nor of foreign stimuli. One has only to maintain a bare survival, to vegetate, like a fetus in a jar.

A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.

The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order...

De wiegen der beschaving zijn de verpestende riolen van de wereld, het knekelhuis waarin de stinkende baarmoeders hun bloederige pakjes vlees en been toevertrouwen.

Mijn vrienden daarentegen verschansten zich nog steviger in de kleine loopgraaf van het begrijpen, een loopgraaf die ze voor zichzelf gegraven hadden. Ze stierven heel comfortabel in hun bedje van begrijpen, werden nuttige leden van de maatschappij. Ik had medelijden met hen, en al heel gauw liet ik ze, zonder de minste spijt, één voor één in de steek.

I was cursed or blessed with a prolonged adolescence; I arrived at some seeming maturity when I was past thirty. It was only in my forties that I really began to feel young. By then I was ready for it.

Europe – medieval, grotesque, monstrous: a symphony in B-mol.

I think of so many eminent men who visited these shores only to return to their native land saddened, disgusted and disillusioned. There is one thing America has to give, and that they are all in agreement about: MONEY.

Before I shall have become a man again I shall probably exist as a park, a sort of natural park in which people come to rest, to while away the time. What they say or do will be of little matter, for they will bring only their fatigue, their boredom, their hopelessness.

Naast dit mensenras bestaat nog een ras van wezens, de onmenselijken, het ras der kunstenaars die, door onbekende impulsen geprikkeld, de levenloze massa van de mensen nemen en door de koortshitte en gisting die zij daarin verwekken dit kleffe deeg in brood veranderen en het brood in wijn en de wijn in zang. Uit dit dode compost en de inerte sintels brengen zij een lied voort dat besmet.

Maybe it doesn't make sense but it's my way. I can't navigate any other way

Once i thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but now I see it was meant to destroy me. Today I am proyd to say that I an 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!

It has been that way ever since the Greeks—a blind fuck in the mud and then a quick spawn and then death.

Dondequiera que fuese fomentaba la discordia: no porque fuera idealista, sino porque era como un reflector que revelaba la estupidez y futilidad de todo.

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 and 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.

Music is still the antidote for the nameless...Music is planetary fire, an irreducible which is all sufficient; it is the slate-writing of the gods...

Eres cáncer y delirio me dijo el otro día por teléfono

If there be any solution of life's problems for the mass of mankind, in this biological continuum which we have entered upon, there is certainly little hope of any for the individual, i.e, the artist. For him the problem is not how to identify himself with the mass about, for in that lies his real death, but how to fecundate the masses by his dying.

Suffering is futile, my intelligence told me over and over, but I went on suffering voluntarily.

Hay algo venenoso en eso! Es tan fantástico que parece convincente

Oro es una palabra nocturna correspondiente a la mente crónica: en ella hay sueño y mito.

The ass tells you everything about a woman, her character, her temperament, whether she is sanguine, morbid, gay or fickle, whether she is responsive or unresponsive, whether she is maternal or pleasure-loving, whether she is truthful or lying by nature.)

Ik ga voor je zingen, een beetje vals misschien, maar ik zing toch. Ik zing terwijl jullie creperen, ik dans op je gore lijk...

Miro al mar, al cielo, a lo ininteligible y distantemente cercano.