Quotes from Henry Miller

Nowhere have I encountered such a dull and monotonous fabric of life as here in America. Here boredom reaches its peak.

Though he exudes culture and learning, he is at home with children, nobodies and idiots. His daily routine is so simple as to be almost primitive. It begins with a long morning prayer for the protection of the creature world against the sadistic men of science who torture and vivisect them. Without wants, he has become free as a bird, and what is more important, he is acutely aware of his hard-won freedom and rejoices in it.

Here at Big Sur, at a certain time of the year and a certain time of the day only, a pale blue-green hue pervades the distant hills. . . . It is not only the tone and color of distance, abetted by the magic fall of light, it is a mystical phenomenon, or so I like to think, born of a certain way of looking at the world.

Tanr?m, biraz akl?m?z olsa ölümü düÅŸününce kalk?p sevincimizden dans ederdik! BulduÄŸumuz çarelerden yararlanmay? bilseydik yar?n hepimiz yataklar?m?zda ölebilirdik, ac? çekmeden, huzur içinde, Ölmek istemiyoruz, sorunumuz bu bizim. Tanr? ve yukar?daki çöp tenekelerindeki diÄŸer her ÅŸey bu yüzden var.

I was a philosopher when still in swaddling clothes. I was against life, on principle. What principle? The principle of futility.

But of that instant I knew my wife was right, knew that I had made a grave mistake. In that moment I sensed the leech that Anaïs had tried to get rid of. I saw the spoiled child, the man who had never done an honest stroke of work in his life, the destitute individual who was too proud to beg openly but was not above milking a friend dry. I knew it all, felt it all, and already foresaw the end.

Dostoyevski okumaya baÅŸlad???m o ilk gece, hayat?m?n en önemli olaylar?ndan biriydi, ilk aÅŸk?mdan bile daha önemli.

You have to get beyond pity, in order to feel from the very roots of your being. One can't make a new heaven and earth with facts. There are no facts. There is only the fact man, every man, everywhere in the world is on his way to ordination. Some men take the long route, and some take the short route. Every man is working out his destiny in his own way, and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous and patient.

When I think of New York I have a very different feeling. New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold, glittering, malign. The buildings dominate. there is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a test tube. Nobody knows what it is about. Nobody directs the energy.

Only when we are truly alone does the fullness and richness of life reveal itself to us. In simplifying our lives, everything acquires a significance hitherto unknown. When we are one with ourselves the most insignificant blade of grass assumes its proper place in the universe

And then, when he had had his fling, when the tent top blew off and he had a good look at the sky, he saw that it wasn't just a circus, but an arena, just like everywhere.

Do we weep when the sun sinks into the ocean? The full magnificence of the sun is revealed to us only in the few moments preceding and following its disappearance.

Goethe was a stuffed shirt, by comparison. Goethe was a respectable citizen, a pedant, a bore, a universal spirit, but stamped with the German trade-mark, with the double eagle. The serenity of Goethe, the calm, Olympian attitude, is nothing more than the drowsy stupor of a German bourgeois deity. Goethe is an end of something, Whitman is a beginning.

As everyone knows, Cleanliness is the chief American industry.

The age demands violence, but we are getting only abortive explosions. Revolutions are nipped in the bud, or else succeed too quickly. Passion is quickly exhausted. Men fall back on ideas, comme d'habitude. Nothing is proposed that can last more than twenty-four hours. We are living a million lives in the space of a generation.

There is only one great adventure and that is inward toward the self

The art of living is based on rhythm - on give and take, ebb and flow, light and dark, life and death. By acceptance of all aspects of life, good and bad, right and wrong, yours and mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are cursed with, is converted into a dance, 'the dance of life,' metamorphosis.

Mostly, I was happy, I was laughing, I was having a good time. I had a good time because, as I said before, I really didn't give a fuck about anything.

America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit.

On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama.

the best way to get over a woman is to turn her into literature

Cuando me dejó, fingía o quizá lo creyera, que era necesario para nuestro bien. Yo sabía en el fondo de mi corazón que estaba intentando liberarse de mí, pero era demasiado cobarde como para reconocerlo.

Make me into any fantastic shape, use all your art, exhaust your lung-power - still I shall only be a thing fabricated, at the best a beautiful cultured soul.

Strange as it may seem today to say, the aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem.