I am fucking you, Tania, so that you'll stay fucked.

— Henry Miller

I am going to sing for you, a little off-key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse.

— Henry Miller

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

If at eighty you're not a cripple or an invalid, if you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual, and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin' and keepin' power. If you are young in years but already weary in spirit, already on your way to becoming an automaton, it may do you good to say to your boss - under your breath, of course - "Fuck you, Jack! You don't own me." If you can whistle up your ass, if you can be turned on by a fetching bottom or a lovely pair of teats, if you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from going sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you've got it half licked.

— Henry Miller

If there is to be any peace it will come through being not having.

— Henry Miller

If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.

— Henry Miller

If this was the true self it was marvelous and what’s more it seemed never to change but always to pick up from the last stop, to continue in the same vein, a vein I had struck when I was a child and went down in the street for the first time alone and there frozen into the dirty ice of the gutter lay a dead cat, the first time I had looked at death and grasped it. From that moment I knew what it was to be isolated: every object, every living thing and every dead thing led its independent existence. My thoughts too led to an independent existence.

— Henry Miller

If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destinations never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

— Henry Miller

If you can't give the illness of a thing give the hotness of it! The main thing is to hook up, get the wheels turning, sound off. When your brakes jam, try going in reverse. If often works.

— Henry Miller

I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object.

— Henry Miller