Quote

To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.

Henry Miller

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Firsts
Necessary
Pair
First
Singing
Pairs
Must
Open
Mouth
Thing
Knowledge
Essential
Song
Mouths
Littles
Essentials
Accordions
Music
Sing
Accordion
Little
Guitar
Lungs

More quotes by Henry Miller

Image
We create our fate every day . . . most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.
Henry Miller
Image
How different the new order would be if we could consult the veteran instead of the politician.
Henry Miller
Image
Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You congeal into a bundle of inanimate fear. You become the very soul of anesthesia. But there is no escaping him. It is your turn now.
Henry Miller
Image
The world isn't kept running because it's a paying proposition. (God doesn't make a cent on the deal.) The world goes on because a few men in every generation believe in it utterly, accept it unquestioningly they underwrite it with their lives.
Henry Miller
Image
Why are we so full of restraint? Why do we not give in all directions? Is it fear of losing ourselves? Until we do lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves.
Henry Miller
Image
Even if one’s whole life were a mistake, there is always time to change.
Henry Miller
Image
Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing. Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn't the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.
Henry Miller
Image
For a metaphysical treat stop at the Big Sur Inn, which is also a haven for stray cats and dogs. Life along the South Coast is just a bed of roses, with a few thorns and nettles interspersed.
Henry Miller
Image
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
Image
I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must writer and write and write, even if everybody in the world advises you against it, even if nobody believes in you.
Henry Miller
Image
The real enemy can always be met and conquered, or won over. Real antagonism is based on love, a love which has not recognized itself.
Henry Miller
Image
Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern.
Henry Miller
Image
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.
Henry Miller
Image
We are dancing in the hollow of nothingness. We are one flesh, but separated like stars.
Henry Miller
Image
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.
Henry Miller
Image
I couldn't allow myself to think about her very long if I had I would have jumped off the bridge. It's strange. I had become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I thought about her only for a minute it was enough to pierce the bone and marrow of my contentment and shove me back again into the agonizing gutter of my wretched past.
Henry Miller
Image
All growth is a leap in the dark.
Henry Miller
Image
Words, sentences, ideas, no matter how subtle or ingenious, the maddest flights of poetry, the most profound dreams, the most hallucinating visions, are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible.
Henry Miller
Image
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.
Henry Miller
Image
Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.
Henry Miller