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I had to learn to think, feel, and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink.

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
Way
Danger
Would
Fashion
Uneducated
Think
Probably
Sink
Thinking
Knowing
Current
World
Learn
Currents
Feel
Throw
Feels
Hardest
Thing
Totally

More quotes by Henry Miller

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Music is the can-opener of the soul.
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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The prisoner is not the one who has commited a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over.
Henry Miller
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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
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And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean, when boredom seems the very stuff of life.
Henry Miller
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We must not just be in the world and above the world, but also of the world. To love it for what it is... is the only task. Avoid it and you are lost. Lose yourself in it, and you are free.
Henry Miller
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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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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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The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition.
Henry Miller
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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.
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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The sordid qualities imputed to the enemy are always those which we recognize as our own and therefore rise to slay, because only through projection do we realize the enormity and horror of them.
Henry Miller
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Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and woman who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will least forever or else are so frightened it won't, that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.
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.
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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We must be holy without holiness. We must be whole, complete. That's being holy. Any other kind of holiness is false, a snare, and a delusion.
Henry Miller
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Until we lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves.
Henry Miller
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I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.
Henry Miller
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Certainly paradise, whatever, wherever it be, contains flaws. (Paradisical flaws, if you like.) If it did not, it would be incapable of drawing the hearts of men or angels.
Henry Miller
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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