Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer (1934)

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Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.

Henry Miller

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.

Henry Miller

I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death.

Henry Miller

An artist is always alone – if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

Henry Miller

Still prowling around. Mid-afternoon. Guts rattling. Beginning to rain now. Notre-Dame rises tomb-like from the water. The gargoyles lean far out over the lace facade. They hang there like an idée fixe in the mind of a monomaniac. An old man with yellow whiskers approaches me. Has some Jaworski nonsense in his hand. Comes up to me with his head thrown back and the rain splashing in his face turns the golden sands to mud.

Henry Miller

Even before the music begins there is that bored look on people's faces. A polite form of self-imposed torture, the concert.

Henry Miller

I hear not a word because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy & willing to die.

Henry Miller

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will.

Henry Miller

I made up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer.

Henry Miller

For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood.

Henry Miller

For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens.

Henry Miller

I knew I wouldn't ever trade all this whirling about my head for Russia or heaven or anything on earth.

Henry Miller

Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.

Henry Miller

Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy.

Henry Miller

All the men she's been with and now you, just you, and the barges going by, masts and hulls, the whole damned current of life flowing through you, through her, through all the guys behind you and after you, the flowers and the birds and the sun streaming in and the fragrance of it choking you, annihilating you.

Henry Miller