Henry Miller Quotes

“The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love.”
― Henry Miller

“To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.”
― Henry Miller

“I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live - if what others are doing is called living - but to express myself.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

“Conditioned to ecstasy, the poet is like a gorgeous unknown bird mired in the ashes of thought. If he succeeds in freeing himself, it is to make a sacrificial flight to the sun. His dreams of a regenerate world are but the reverberations of his own fevered pulse beats. He imagines the world will follow him, but in the blue he finds himself alone. Alone but surrounded by his creations; sustained, therefore, to meet the supreme sacrifice. The impossible has been achieved; the duologue of author with Author is consummated. And now forever through the ages the song expands, warming all hearts, penetrating all minds. At the periphery the world is dying away; at the center it glows like a live coal. In the great solar heart of the universe the golden birds are gathered in unison. There it is forever dawn, forever peace, harmony and communion. Man does not look to the sun in vain; he demands light and warmth not for the corpse which he will one day discard but for his inner being. His greatest desire is to burn with ecstasy, to commerge his little flame with the central fire of the universe. If he accords the angels wings so that they may come to him with messages of peace, harmony and radiance from worlds beyond, it is only to nourish his own dreams of flight, to sustain his own belief that he will one day reach beyond himself, and on wings of gold. One creation matches another; in essence they are all alike. The brotherhood of man consists not in thinking alike, nor in acting alike, but in aspiring to praise creation. The song of creation springs from the ruins of earthly endeavor. The outer man dies away in order to reveal the golden bird which is winging its way toward divinity.”
― Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud

“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.”
― Henry Miller

“I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I didn't give a fuck whether I found anything or not. The thing is, never to be too anxious. Everything comes in due time.”
― Henry Millery, Tropic of Cancer

“ja znam da sloboda znači odgovornost.isto tako znam kako se lako želja može pretvoriti u čin. čak i kad sklopim oči, moram paziti kako sanjam i o čemu, jer samo najtanji veo deli tada san od jave.”
― Henry Miller, The World Of Sex

“I am so thoroughly healthy and empty. No dreams, no desires. I am like the luscious deceptive fruit which hangs on the Californian trees. One more ray of sun and I will be rotten”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

“I love everything that flows,” said the great blind Milton of our times. I was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its painful gallstones, its gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund. I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph, or unilateral. I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution. The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“And inevitably there always crept into our discussions the figure of Whitman, that one lone figure which America has produced in the course of her brief life. In Whitman the whole American scene comes to life, her past and her future, her birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in America Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be said.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“For River to discover himself in Rimbaud's life and Miller's prose was simultaneously self-aggrandizing and self-pitying. Tellingly, he was more interested in Miller's book than in Rimbaud's actual writing: he responded to Rimbaud not as a poet, but as a symbol.”
― Gavin Edwards, Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind

“No greater humiliation, it seems to me, was meted out to any man than Montezuma; no race was ever more ruthlessly wiped out that the American Indian; no land was ever raped in a bloody and foul way than California was by the gold diggers. I blush to think of our origins—our hands are steeped in blood and crime.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

“...He it is, if any man today possesses the gift, who knows where to dissolve the human figure, who has the courage to sacrifice an harmonious line in order to detect rhythm and murmur of the blood, who takes light that has been refracted inside him and lets it flood the keyboard of color. Behind the minutiae, the chaos, the mockery of life, he detects the invisible pattern; he announces his discoveries in the metaphysical pigment of space. No searching formulae, no crucifixion of ideas, no compulsion other than to create. Even as the world goes to smash there is one man who remains at the core, who becomes more solidly fixed and anchored, more centrifugal as the process of dissolution quickens.”
― Henry Miller

“Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. Henry Miller”
― Henry Miller

“Nothing is more obscene than inertia. More blasphemous than the bloodiest oath is paralysis.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Niçin böylesine sınırlıyoruz kendimizi? Niçin her şeye açık değiliz? Kendimizi kaybetmekten mi korkuyoruz yoksa? Kendimizi kaybedene dek kendimizi bulma umudumuz olamaz.”
― Henry Miller, The World Of Sex

“A good artist must also have a streak of insanity in him, if by insanity is meant an exaggerated inability to adapt. The individual who can adapt to this mad world of to-day is either a nobody or a sage. In the one case he is immune to art and in the other he is beyond it.”
― Henry Miller

“He was going to escort us to the Temple of Jupiter and the Theseion and other places as soon as we had had our fill of the Acropolis. We never went to these places, of course. We told him to drive into town, find a cool spot and order some ice cream.”
― Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi

“By late afternoon I'm ready to strangle Riva Chirenko's daughter. I don't know her name. Nobody calls her Mrs. Tomanovich. She's Mr. Tomanovich's wife. Riva's daughter. Irena Tomanovich's mother. She's what's wrong with all of us women, that schleppe from the steppe. But at other times it is this same woman, Riva Chirenko's daughter, that I respect, revere. If I could only accept as she has done, just accept. Acceptance is faith, Henry Miller said. I could strangle him too.”
― Lucia Berlin, Evening in Paradise: More Stories

“Life," said Emerson, "consists in what a man is thinking all day." If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine. I not only think about food all day, but I dream about it at night.
But I don’t ask to go back to America, to be put in a double harness again, to work the treadmill. No, I prefer to be a poor man of Europe. God knows, I am poor enough; it only remains to be a man.”
― Henry Miller

“Life," said Emerson, "consists in what a man is thinking all day." If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine. I not only think about food all day, but I dream about it at night.
But I don’t ask to go back to America, to be put in a double harness again, to work the treadmill. No, I prefer to be a poor man of Europe. God knows, I am poor enough; it only remains to be a man.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I love everything that flows,’ said the great blind Milton of our times. I was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with it’s painful gall-stones, it’s gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul...”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Moralistlerin tutkusu olan, varlığın “iğrenç” davranışlarını ortadan kaldırma çabası yalnızca saçma değil, aynı zamanda boşunadır da. Bir insan, çirkin, “günah” düşünce ve isteklerini, içgüdü ve itkilerini bastırmayı başarabilir, ama bunun sonuçları yıkıma yol açabilir. Ermiş olmakla katil olmak arasındaki sınır, kıl kadar incedir.”
― Henry Miller, The World Of Sex

“İster kabul edilsin, ister edilmesin, sanatçının kafası sürekli olarak dünyayı yeniden yaratma, insanın saflığını yeniden yaratma düşüncesiyle meşguldür. Bunun ötesinde, insanın saflığını yalnızca özgürlüğünü kazanarak yeniden elde edebileceğini bilir. Özgürlüğün buradaki anlamı otomasyonun ölümüdür.”
― Henry Miller, The World Of Sex

“Ben kendimle yaşamayı öğrendim. Ve bunu da seviyorum.”
― Henry Miller, The World Of Sex

“(P)assages of those books I once wrote in my head came back, like the curled edges of a dream which refuse to flatten out. They would always be flapping there, those curled edges... flapping from the cornices of those dingy shit-brown shanties, those slat-faced saloons, those foul rescue and shelter places where the bleary-eyed, codfish-faced bums hung about like lazy flies, and O God, how miserable they looked, how wasted, how blenched, how withered and hollowed out!”
― Henry Miller, Nexus

“Las palabras son soledad. Anoche dejé unas palabras para ti sobre el mantel: las tapaste con los codos”
― Henry Miller

“the only time a writer receives his due reward is when someone comes to him burning with this flame which he fanned in a moment of solitude, honest criticism means nothing, what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire”
― Henry Miller

“What I feel about Henry now is this: he had ten years of comfort, laziness, self-indulgence, effortlessness, and aside from writing, he gave himself the easiest, softest life, without ever collaborating to make my burden lighter, or at least sharing it in part, or seeking to give me the same share of ease and softness. He never denied himself, drove himself, sacrificed, pinched, or renounced a single whim, pleasure, and therefore I have done well by him, gave him what very few artists have ever been given, ten years of peace and ease, and now he is well known, he is launched, he can easily obtain this from the world. And I do not feel it is wrong for me to put an end to my continuous sacrifices for him. I gave to the limit, of my body and soul. It has to end now. Lately he has not even thought it necessary to compensate these efforts with his presence, has taken without returning even in love or companionship and has made me merely the provider.”
― Anaïs Nin