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Reading
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Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.
-Henry Miller
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A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.
-Henry Miller
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All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.
-Henry Miller
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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, The Books In My Life, 1969
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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 soul.
-Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
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Reality
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Reality is not protected or defended by laws, proclamations, ukases, cannons and armadas. Reality is that which is sprouting all the time out of death and disintegration.
-Henry Miller
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Religion
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Who hates the Jews more than the Jew?
-Henry Miller
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Salvation
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There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.
-Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi, 1941
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Security
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The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.
-Henry Miller
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Sex
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What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.
-Henry Miller
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Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant.
-Henry Miller, Sexus, ch. 21 (1949)
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Society
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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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Solitude
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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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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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Superstition
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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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Talent
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The American white man (not to speak of the Indian, the Negro, the Mexican) hasn't a ghost of a chance. If he has any talent he's doomed to have it crushed one way or another. The American way is to seduce a man by bribery and make a prostitute of him. Or else to ignore him, starve him into submission and make a hack of him.
-Henry Miller
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Technology
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A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but today it is caricatural. Our world is a world of things.... What we dread most, in the face of the impending d
-Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, preface, 1945
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Torture
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Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You congeal into a bundle of inanimate fear. You become the very soul of anesthesia. But there is no escaping him. It is your turn now...
-Henry Miller
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Tragedy
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The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again. No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one's pocket for another meal.
-Henry Miller
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Travel
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If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
-Henry Miller
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War
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No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe.
-Henry Miller
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Youth
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The American ideal is youth --handsome, empty youth.
-Henry Miller
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Books by and about Henry Miller