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I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: The world of art is the only such realm.

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
Slave
Masters
Art
Time
World
Demanded
Realm
Realms
Master

More quotes by Henry Miller

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We create our fate every day . . . most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.
Henry Miller
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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.
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A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation... A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.
Henry Miller
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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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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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At Epidaurus, in the stillness, in the great peace that came over me, I heard the heart of the world beat. I know what the cure is: it is to give up, to relinquish, to surrender, so that our little hearts may beat in unison with the great heart of the world.
Henry Miller
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The worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfillment instead of an horizon.
Henry Miller
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Of course you don't die. Nobody dies. Death doesn't exist. You only reach a new level of vision, a new realm of consciousness, a new unknown world.
Henry Miller
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The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of reality is falling to tatters. The grand whorehouse which they have made of life requires no decoration it is essential that only the drains function adequately. Beauty, that feline beauty that has us by the balls in America, is finished.
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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It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world - it's the American way of looking at things.
Henry Miller
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Were there a Christian so faithful to his God as I was to her we would all be Jesus Christ today.
Henry Miller
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Until we lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves.
Henry Miller
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Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artists.
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.
Henry Miller
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If any man dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.
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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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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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.
Henry Miller
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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.
Henry Miller