Quotes from Henry Miller

Everything that happened to him was of a bad nature. It couldn't be otherwise. He lived in the expectation that things would grow worse, and of course they always did.

I don't care what happens. I love you and that's what I wanted to say over the phone. That's what I wanted to write. I love you. Let things go to smash. I love you.

We came together in a dance of death and so quickly was I sucked down into the vortex that when I came to the surface again I could not recognize the world. When I found myself loose the music had ceased; the carnival was over and I had been picked clean.

Consideraba que la continuación de una existencia que no había pedido no iba a probar, verificar, añadir, ni substraer nada.

the flight which the poet makes over the face of the earth and then, as if he had been ordained to re-enact a lost drama, the heroic descent to the very bowls of the earth, the dark and fearsome sojourn in the belly of the whale, the bloody struggle to liberate himself, to emerge clean of the past, a bright, gory sun god cast up on an alien shore.

Hay algo perverso en las mujeres... en el fondo son todas masoquistas.

A continual oscillation between extremes, with bare stretches that taste like brass and leave the full flavor of emptiness.

I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love.

Here all boundaries fade away and the world reveals itself for the mad slaughterhouse that it is. The treadmill stretches way to infinitude, the hatched are closed down tight, logic runs rampant, with bloody cleaver flashing. The air is chill and stagnant, the language apocalyptic. Not an exit sign anywhere; no issue save death. A blind alley at the end of which is a scaffold.

Es extraño. Había llegado a resignarme tanto a aquella vida sin ella y, sin embargo, si pensaba en ella sólo por un minuto, era suficiente para traspasar el hueso y la médula de mi conformidad y arrojarme de nuevo al canal agonizante de mi lastimoso pasado.

Why do people live in outlandish climates in the temperate zones, as they are miscalled? Because people are naturally idiots, naturally sluggards, naturally cowards.

No hotels in the past participle, no subjunctive modes, no conjunctivitis.

el mundo nunca deja morir de hambre a una mujer guapa.

over the dull cranium of Zola the chimneys are belching pure coke, while the Madonna of Sandwiches listens with cabbage ears to the bubbling of the gas tanks, those beautiful bloated toads which squat by the roadside.

He had, moreover, a gift which I only learned the value of much later, namely, the ability to discover in every author that which is valuable and lasting.

The reason why it is difficult to tell it is because I remember too much.

Each one is traveling his own way ad though the earth be rotting with good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there, such a sweat to escape, that the weak and the helpless are trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard.

To be sick, to be neurotic, if you like, is to ask for guarantees. The neurotic is the flounder that lies on the bed of the river, securely settled in the mud, waiting to be speared. For him, death is the only certainty, and dread of that grim certainty immobilizes him in a living death far more horrible than the one he imagines but knows nothing about.

Quien, por un amor demasiado grande, lo que al fin y al cabo es monstruoso, muere de sufrimiento, renace para no conocer ni amor ni odio, sino para disfrutar. Y ese disfrute de la vida, por haberse adquirido de forma no natural, es un veneno que tarde temprano corrompe al mundo entero. Lo que nace más allá de los límites del sufrimiento humano actúa como un boomerang y provoca destrucción.

My world of human beings has perished; I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort.

give you a nostalgia for a people and a soil you have never known, but which is in your blood, mysteriously there in your blood, like the sense of time and space, a fugitive, constant value that you turn more and more when you get old, which you try to seize with your mind, but ineffectually

If you have no money but only a love of freedom, only a prayer for mercy on your lips, you are debarred, returned to the slaughter-house, shunned as a leper.

I am appalled by the potentialities of drama that are still contained in these feeble bodies.

Iedereen heeft een lotsbestemming; de enige verplichting is die te volgen en te accepteren, waar zij ook toe mag leiden.