Henry Miller Quotes - Page 14

Quotes about:

• The essential thing is to WANT to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.

  Henry Miller

  Song, Singing, Essentials

  Henry Miller, John Calder (1985). “A Henry Miller reader”, Riverrun Pr

  4 Copy quote

• France may one day exist no more, but the Dordogne will live on just as dreams live on and nourish the souls of men.

  Henry Miller

  Dream, Men, Soul

  Henry Miller (2010). “The Colossus of Maroussi”, p.7, New Directions Publishing

  4 Copy quote

• And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?

  Henry Miller

  Men, Literature, Divine

  Henry Miller (1957). “Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch”, p.320, New Directions Publishing

  6 Copy quote

• When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.

  Henry Miller

  Men, Literature, Limits

  Henry Miller (1970). “The Air-Conditioned Nightmare”, p.85, New Directions Publishing

  8 Copy quote

• Until he [man] has become fully human, until he learns to conduct himself as a member of the earth, he will continue to create gods who will destroy him. The tragedy of Greece lies not in the destruction of a great culture but in the abortion of a great vision.

  Henry Miller

  Lying, Men, Abortion

  4 Copy quote

• I like the one about the little soulworms that fly out of the nest for the resurrection.

  Henry Miller

  Poetry, Soul, Nests

  Henry Miller (1961). “The Cosmological Eye”, p.147, New Directions Publishing

  4 Copy quote

• When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat.

  Henry Miller

  Friendship, Power, Appreciate

  Henry Miller (2007). “Sexus: The Rosy Crucifixion I”, p.28, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  8 Copy quote

• When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written.

  Henry Miller

  Reality, Chaos, Womb

  Henry Miller, John Calder (1985). “A Henry Miller reader”, Riverrun Pr

  4 Copy quote

• For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured-disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui-in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.

  Henry Miller

  Fear, War, Eye

  Henry Miller, John Calder (1985). “A Henry Miller reader”, Riverrun Pr

  6 Copy quote

• The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul's death, and coincident with the disappearance of great men, great deeds, great causes, great wars, etc.

  Henry Miller

  Death, Sex, War

  Henry Miller (1961). “The Cosmological Eye”, p.120, New Directions Publishing

  4 Copy quote

• Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc.

  Henry Miller

  Sports, Suicide, Fashion

  Henry Miller (1961). “The Cosmological Eye”, p.177, New Directions Publishing

  14 Copy quote

• The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph.

  Henry Miller

  Love, Sweet, Wall

  Henry Miller (1963). “Black spring”, Grove Pr

  8 Copy quote

• I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions.

  Henry Miller

  Writing, Lines, Action

  Henry Miller, John Calder (1985). “A Henry Miller reader”, Riverrun Pr

  9 Copy quote

• Instead of asking 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask 'How much good? How much joy?'

  Henry Miller

  Damage Is Done, Joy, Why Not

  Henry Miller (1970). “The Air-conditioned Nightmare”, p.172, New Directions Publishing

  8 Copy quote

• All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet - if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

  Henry Miller

  Funny, Book, Reading

  Henry Miller (2007). “Black Spring”, p.48, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  4 Copy quote

• Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

  Henry Miller

  Book, Reading, Magic

  Henry Miller (1969). “Mémoires, Plaidoiries Et Documents”, p.139, New Directions Publishing

  4 Copy quote

• Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they need to be surrounded with sufficient space―space even more than time.

  Henry Miller

  Distance, Space, Needs

  Henry Miller (1959). “The Henry Miller Reader”, p.36, New Directions Publishing

  4 Copy quote

• Each man has his own way of being himself and of saying it so ultimately that he can't be denied.

  Henry Miller

  Men, Individuality, Way

  4 Copy quote

• The vast difference between astrology and other sciences, if I may put it thus, is that astrology deals not with facts but with profundities. The solid ground on which the scientist pretends to rest gives way, in astrology, to imponderables.

  Henry Miller

  Differences, Astrology, Giving

  4 Copy quote

• I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget.

  Henry Miller

  Eye, Cities, Order

  4 Copy quote

• The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of reality is falling to tatters. The grand whorehouse which they have made of life requires no decoration; it is essential that only the drains function adequately. Beauty, that feline beauty that has us by the balls in America, is finished.

  Henry Miller

  Fall, Reality, Men

  4 Copy quote

• A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there - that of the pulse, the heart beat.

  Henry Miller

  Horse, Stars, Reading

  Henry Miller (1961). “The Cosmological Eye”, p.273, New Directions Publishing

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Henry Miller

  Swim, Void, Planets

  Henry Miller (1977). “Tropic of Cancer”

  4 Copy quote

• But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if he hasn’t any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that you can’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death. We know too much, maybe. There are some of us who don’t live in the moment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind.

  Henry Miller

  Hero, Fighting, Men

  Henry Miller, Norman Mailer (1976). “Genius and lust: a journey through the major writings of Henry Miller”, Grove Press

  4 Copy quote

• For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens. Not one of us is intact, and yet we have in us all the continents and the seas between the continents and the birds of the air. We are going to put it down ― the evolution of this world which has died but which has not been buried.

  Henry Miller

  Crazy, Men, Our World

  Henry Miller, John Calder (1985). “A Henry Miller reader”, Riverrun Pr

  6 Copy quote

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