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If you can fall in love again and again if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical you've got it half licked.

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
Keep
Cynical
Wells
Forgive
Well
Bitter
Love
Forgiving
Growing
Forget
Licked
Half
Surly
Fall
Sour

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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.
Henry Miller
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Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.
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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.
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We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means that things are under control when the poor fly it means danger, revolution, anarchy.
Henry Miller
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Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.
Henry Miller
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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.
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Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. To-day I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity - I belong to the earth!
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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
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Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future, too, like something out of Fritz Lang's feeble imagination.
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The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way.
Henry Miller
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Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.
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All growth is a leap in the dark.
Henry Miller
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Leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.
Henry Miller
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When you meet the man [Brassai] you see at once that he is equipped with no ordinary eyes. And the sharpness of vision and depth of insight are revealed in Brassai's lifelong photographic exploration of Paris - its people, places, and things.
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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
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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.
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One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.
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Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge and on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, and not one idiot ever thinks of blowing up the bridge.
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An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
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But it's just because the chances are all against you, just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here.
Henry Miller