Quotes from Henry Miller

Even if one's whole life were a mistake, there is always time to change.

Many is the mirage I chased. Always I was overreaching myself. The oftener I touched reality, the harder I bounced back to the world of illusion, which is the name for everyday life.

Surrealism is merely the reflection of the death process. It is one of the manifestations of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end.

The most wonderful opportunity which life offers is to be human.

All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.

We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.

We are swimming on the face of time and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown.

For there is only one great adventure and that is inward toward the self, and for that, time nor space nor even deeds matter.

The enchanting, and sometimes terrifying, thing is that the world can be so many things to so many different souls. That it can be, and is, all these things at once and the same time.

The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.

Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.

Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.

The cancer of time is eating us away

History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time.

You start out with the sublime and you end up in an alley jerking away for dear life.

The moment one is on the side of life; peace and security drop out of consciousness. The only peace, the only security, is in fulfillment.

Life's wildest moment---she kneels on the sidewalk. Everything else she does is lies, lies.

But it's just because the chances are all against you, just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here.

Whoever uses the spirit that isin him creatively is an artist. Tomake living itself an art, that isthe goal.

I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: The world of art is the only such realm.

The concert is a polite form of self induced torture.

Reality is not protected or defended by laws, proclamations, ukases, cannons and armadas. Reality is that which is sprouting all the time out of death and disintegration.

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

If you can fall in love again and again if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical you've got it half licked.