Quote

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.

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
Everybody
Wondering
Sure
Marvelous
Hands
Mess
Earth
Begin
Everything
Inside
Opener
Like
Hand
Imbecile
Open
Imbeciles
Wonder
Underneath

More quotes by Henry Miller

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We are dancing in the hollow of nothingness. We are one flesh, but separated like stars.
Henry Miller
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Keep your libraries, your penal institutions, your insaneasylums... give me beer.You think man needs rule, he needs beer. The world does not need morals, it needs beer... The souls of men have been fed with indigestibles, but the soul could make use of beer.
Henry Miller
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Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal.
Henry Miller
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The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you.
Henry Miller
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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.
Henry Miller
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Plots and character don't make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip.
Henry Miller
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I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.
Henry Miller
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I think someday you're going to be a great writer, he said. But he added maliciously, first you'll have to suffer a bit. I mean really suffer, because you don't know what the word means yet. You only think you've suffered. You've got to fall in love first.
Henry Miller
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Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.
Henry Miller
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An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
Henry Miller
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The history of the world is the history of the privileged few.
Henry Miller
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To make living itself an art, that is the goal.
Henry Miller
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The practice of any art demands more than 'mere savoir faire'. One must not only be in love with what one does, one must also know how to make love. In love self is obliterated. Only the beloved counts.
Henry Miller
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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
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Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.
Henry Miller
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The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough is love.
Henry Miller
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Out yonder they may curse, revile, and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here, it is unthinkable, here there is abiding peace, the peace of God, and the serene security created by a handful of good neighbors living at one with the creature world.
Henry Miller
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Who wants to be a hundred? What's the point of it? A short life and a merry one is far better than a long one sustained by fear, caution, and perpetual medical surveillance.
Henry Miller
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If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without.
Henry Miller
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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