Some Quotes from Henry Miller

I read Henry Miller long ago and don't remember my feelings reading him, just the look of the books, which is, I agree, odd. He  lived a version of honesty, was perhaps romantic, as in a bit skewed. I know longer know what "liberated" means - the complication being wrought from both gender politics and realities of life. These quotes shine with spirit and commitment - both admirable.  They are a direct copy and paste from an excellent site, Henry Miller - by Dr. Hugo Heyrman. 

"No appointments, no invitations for dinner, no program, no dough. The golden period, when I had not a single friend.—Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer)

"I keep the Ping-Pong table handy for people I don’t want to talk to. You know, it’s simple. I just play Ping-Pong with them." —Henry Miller

"The art of living is based on rhythm - on give and take, ebb and flow, light and dark, life and death. By acceptance of all the aspects of life, good and bad, right and wrong, yours and mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are cursed with, is converted into a dance, 'the dance of life.' The real function of the dance is metamorphosis." —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 soul. It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!" 
—Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer)

"To keep the mind empty is a feat, a very healthful feat too. To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. The book-learning gradually dribbles away; problems melt and dissolve; ties are gently severed; thinking, when you deign to indulge in it, becomes very primitive; the body becomes a new and wonderful instrument; you look at plants or stones or fish with different eyes; you wonder what people are struggling to accomplish by their frenzied activities; you know there is a war on but you haven’t the faintest idea what it’s about or why people should enjoy killing one another." —Henry Miller (The Colossus of Maroussi)

Letter:  July 31, 1949. For more information click here. 

Henry Miller, Krishnamurti: YOU must acknowledge YOUR rights

My first resolution of the new year which is soon to be upon us: read The Books in My Life by Henry Miller (December 26, 1891–June 7, 1980). I stumbled across this today.

Men are reluctant to accept what is easy to grasp. Out of a perversity deeper than all Satan’s wiles, man refuses to acknowledge his own God-given rights: he demands deliverance or salvation by and though an intermediary; he seeks guides, counselors, leaders, systems, rituals. He looks for solutions which are in his own breast. He puts learning above wisdom, power above the art of discrimination. But above all, he refuses to work for his own liberation, pretending that first “the world” must be liberated. Yet, as Krishnamurti has pointed out time and again, the world problem is bound up with the problem of the individual. Truth is ever present, Eternity is here and now. And salvation? What is it, O man, that you wish to save? Your petty ego? Your soul? Your identity? Lose it and you will find yourself. Do not worry about God—God knows how to take care of Himself. Cultivate your doubts, embrace every kind of experience, keep on desiring, strive neither to forget nor to remember, but assimilate and integrate what you have experienced.

— Henry Miller discussing Krishnamurti in The Books in My Life (New Directions)

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Eternity.html