Henry Miller

I've spent too much time away from reading Henry due to school - which I know he'd be disappointed in me for sticking it out this long and not just living. I flip through a few pages from The Time of the Assassins and see all my highlights which in turn causes flooding of all these other brilliant things he said from everything of his I have read.

And in that moment I realize I have lost myself in this city many times over.

"... I saw finally that no matter how much I did it was just a drop in the bucket. I'm not saying that I grew indifferent, or hardened, no, but I realized that it would take a revolution to make any appreciable change in conditions. And when I say revolution, I mean a real revolution, something far more real and sweeping than the Russian Revolution for instance. I still think that, but I don't think it can be done politically or economically. Governments can't bring it about. Only individuals, each one working quietly in his own way. It must be a revolution of the heart. Our attitude towards life has to be fundamentally altered. We've got to advance to another level, a level from which we can take in the whole of the earth with one glance. We have to have vision of the globe, including all the people who inhabit it - down to the lowest and most primitive man."
Henry Miller - "The Alcoholic Veteran with the Washboard Cranium", From Nights of Love and Laughter. p 39 1955

taken out of context to paint a picture

It's the inside of a watch functioning perfectly in an incredible chaos.

They are cruel in the way children are cruel. They walk over you to reach for a new toy...

To speak well one must have an appreciative audience.

Somewhere there is a leak in you. Until it is repaired you can never become the great human being which you are.

A little sympathy, that's what's needed. Better to be wrong, better to be unjust, than to turn your back on sympathy.

He is interested in the theory of medicine, not the art of therapy.

all taken from Aller Retour New York, by Henry Miller.

words

some quotes from some things I've been reading lately - all outside of school work.

“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.” - Henry Miller

"We do not undertake analysis of works because we want to copy them or because we suspect them. We investigate the methods by which another has created his work, in order to set ourselves in motion." - Paul Klee

"Thought is not what inhabits a certain conduct and gives it its meaning; rather, it is what allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and to question it's meaning, it's conditions, and its goals. Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects upon it as a problem," - Michel Foucault

"If it had not been for this thing, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, justice, for man's understanding of man, as now we do by accident. Our words - our lives - our pains - nothing! The taking of our lives - lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler - all! That last moment belong to us - that agony is our triumph." - Bartolomeo Vanzetti, comment to a reporter before his execution (1927)