Quotes from Henry Miller

They cut the umbilical cord, give you a slap on the ass, and presto! you're out in the world, adrift, a ship without a rudder.

The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting that it was like the flash of a knife.

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

The cancer of time is eating us away

From the little reading I had done I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were molding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and in truth alone. They recognized only one kind of activity - creation.

They never opened the door which leads to the soul.

There's something perverse about women...they're all masochists at heart.

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written thank God.

The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous. The language of society is conformity; the language of the creative individual is freedom. Life will continue to be a hell as long as people who make up the world shut their eyes to reality.

Even the idiot may have a message for us

either you take in believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird.

New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolute meaningless.

The city grows like a cancer; I must grow like a sun. The city eats deeper and deeper into the red; it is an insatiable white louse which must die eventually of inanition. I am going to starve the white louse which is eating me up. I am going to die as a city in order to become again a man. Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth.

As long as that spark of passion is missing there is no human significance in the performance.

All I ask of life, he says, is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt.

He saw that science had become as great a hoax as religion, that nationalism was a farce, patriotism a fraud, education a form of leprosy, and that morals were for cannibals

He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment.

And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean, when boredom seems the very stuff of life.

To love! To surrender absolutely, to prostrate oneself before the divine image, to die a thousand imaginary deaths, to annihilate every trace of self, to find the whole universe embodied and enshrined in the living image of another! Adolescent, we say. Rot! This is the germ of the future life, the seed which we hide away, which we bury deep within us, which we smother and stifle and do our utmost to destroy as we advance from one experience to another and flutter and flounder and lose our way.

Your nearness is the nearness of planets. I am the void between you. If I withdraw there will be no void for you to swim in.

Writing is its own reward.

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

Every time you come to the limit of what is demanded of you, you are faced with the same problem-to be yourself!

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