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In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.

Henry Miller

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Henry Miller
Age: 88 †
Born: 1891
Born: December 26
Died: 1980
Died: June 7
Essayist
Novelist
Painter
Writer
New York City
New York
Genri Miller
Henri Miller
Phineas Flapdoodle
Two
Attempt
Men
Related
Life
Defeat
Deny
Dying
Inextricably
Literature
Obliged
Moving
Inevitably
Death
Moves

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Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of any help except by being kind, generous, and patient.
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All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet.
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Her fluency was marvelous. She would say things at random, intricate, flamelike, or slide off into a parenthetical limbo peppered with fireworks-- admirable linguistic feats which a practiced writer might struggle for hours to achieve.
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New York has a trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness if you have no inner stabilizer.
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For the artist to attach himself to his work, or identify himself with it, is suicidal.
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What I want is to open up. I want to know what's inside me. I want everybody to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin-- to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I'm sure of it.
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Cluster together like stars!
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The most difficult thing to adjust to, apparently, is peace and contentment.
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The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
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Topographically the country is magnificent - and terrifying. Why terrifying? Because nowhere else in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete. Nowhere have I encountered such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as here in America. Here boredom reaches its peak.
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When you can't create you can work
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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.
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And the books you write. They're not you. They're not me sitting here, this Henry Miller. They belong to someone else. It's terrible. You can never rest.
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Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
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Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.
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To make living itself an art, that is the goal.
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Over there you think of nothing but becoming President of the United States some day. Potentially every man is Presidential timber. Here it's different. Here every man is potentially a zero. If you become something or somebody it is an accident, a miracle.
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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.
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Perhaps I have not lined his portrait too clearly. But if he exists, if only for the reason that I have imagined him to be. He came from the blue and returns to the blue. He has not perished, he is not lost. Neither will he be forgotten.
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It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.
Henry Miller