Henry Miller
Overview
Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism
Mysticism
Mysticism is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, i.e. levels of being, beyond normal human perception, including experience and even communion with a supreme being.-Classical origins:...

, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional.
Quotations

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

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.

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.

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 idee 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

 
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