Quotes from Henry Miller

To keep the mind empty is a feat, a very healthful feat too. To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.

I thought, when I came upon her, that I was seizing hold of life… instead I lost hold of life completely, I reached out for something to attach myself to—and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for—myself.

Despite all the talk about freedom of speech, freedom of the press, electoral freedom, and so on, I dare say it would be a shock to know what the common man thinks about the problems which confront the world. The common man is always cleverly set off one against the other, children are always ruled out, young people are ordered to conform and obey, and the views of the wise, the saintly, the true servers of mankind, are forever scorned as impractical.

??? ????? ???? ?????????? ??? ????? ???????, ?????? ??? ????? ???????? ? ??????? ?????. But there is something colossal about any human figure when that individual becomes truly and thoroughly human.

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 escape. The weather will not change.

One doesn't want appreciation... one wants response. To tell you the truth, I don't know what I want of you, or of anybody for that matter. I want more than I get, that's all I know. I want you to step out of your skin - I want everybody to strip down, not just to the flesh, but the soul.

of awesome, indestructible beauty, of cosmic violation, of world ruin suspended in the sky like a fatal omen, of the eternality of beauty even when blasted and desecrated.

Y cuando hayamos atravesado todas las calles y solo quede el polvo de nuestros pies frenéticos, todavía quedaría el recuerdo de tu ancha cara llena, tan blanca, y la gruesa boca con frescos labios entreabiertos, los dientes blancos como la tiza y todos ellos perfectos, y en ese recuerdo nada puede cambiar en modo alguno, porque esto, como tus dientes, es perfecto...

They were alive and they spoke to me! That is the simplest and most eloquent way in which I can refer to those authors who have remained with me over the years.

To rouse the sluggish minds of adults to such a point of awareness is in itself an almost insuperable task. But even more difficult, assuming that this might be accomplished, would be the task of getting them to agree as to how their young should be reared and by whom. In their present state of madness one is inclined to suspect that they would rather the young perished with them than risk the possibility of seeing them grow up into fearless, independent-minded, peace-loving individuals.

Oh, well, these are night thoughts produced by walking in the rain after two thousand years of Christianity. At least now the birds are well provided for, and the cats and dogs. 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.

That is to say, he had no theory at all, except to penetrate to the very essence of things and, in the light of each fresh revelation to so live his life that there would be a minimum of discord between the truths which were revealed to him and the exemplification of these truths in action.

El hombre no es capaz si quiera de destruirse a sí mismo; solo puede destruir a los demás.

No existe una diferencia fundamental, inalterable entre las cosas: todo es flujo, todo es perecedero. La superficie de tu ser está desintegrándose constantemente; sin embargo, por dentro te vuelves duro como un diamante. Y quizá sea ese núcleo duro, magnético, dentro de ti lo que atrae a los otros hacia ti de buen o mal grado. Una cosa es segura: que cuando mueres y resucitas, perteneces a la tierra y lo que quiera que sea de la tierra es tuyo inalienablemente.

The writer] doesn't want a new world which might be established immediately, because he knows it would never suit him. He wants an impossible world in which he is the uncrowned puppet ruler dominated by forces utterly beyond his control.

Studierea crimei începe prin a te cunoaÈ™te pe tine însuÈ›i

P)assages of those books I once wrote in my head came back, like the curled edges of a dream which refuse to flatten out. They would always be flapping there, those curled edges... flapping from the cornices of those dingy shit-brown shanties, those slat-faced saloons, those foul rescue and shelter places where the bleary-eyed, codfish-faced bums hung about like lazy flies, and O God, how miserable they looked, how wasted, how blenched, how withered and hollowed out!

At the end of the day, I always had a list of five or six who were worth trying out. The game was to keep them on the string, to promise them a job, but to get a free fuck first. Usually, it was only necessary to throw a feed in them to them in order to bring them back to the office at night...

Doi ucigaÈ™i iubindu-se pân? la moarte, din priviri. Nu este aceasta cea mai splendid? tortur??

Kill the futile striving, is the thought. Do not put the Buddha (or the Christ) beyond, outside yourself. Recognize him in yourself. Be that which you are, completely.

Sürüye kat?lmay? seçersen ba????kl?k kazan?rs?n. Kabul görmek ve takdir edilmek istiyorsan kendini hiçliÄŸe indirgemen, sürüdeki diÄŸer koyanlardan ay?rt edilmez k?lman gerekir. DüÅŸ görebilirsin, ama herkesle ayn? düÅŸü görmek koÅŸuluyla.

No stone was laid upon· another with love or reverence; no street was laid for dance or joy. One thing has been added to another in a mad scramble to fill the belly, and the streets smell of empty bellies and full bellies and bellies half full. The streets smell of a hunger which has nothing to do with love; they smell of thc belly which is insatiable and of the creations of the cmpty helly which are null and void.

He had a little story for every situation, Ghompal. I relished them hugely; they were like simple, homeopathic remedies, little pellets of truth garbed in some innocuous cloak. You could never forget them afterwards, that was what I liked about these yarns. We write fat books to expound a simple idea; the Oriental tells a simple, pointed story which lodges in your brain like a diamond

The hope that we may one day awaken to a condition of life utterly different from that which we experience daily makes men willing victims of every form of tyranny and suppression. Man is stultified by hope and fear.