nine books by Henry Miller (1891-1980)

Henry Miller is certainly one of the most controversial writers of the 20th century (follow this link to see a brief biographical essay). The following nine books have provided considerable personal insight into the subtlety and the significance that can be conveyed by the written word. I have provided QUOTES from each book in the hope that will help to convey why Mr. Miller has made such an impression. Additional information about each book can be found at amazon.com by simply clicking on the book cover links or titles below.

Please scroll down to see book titles, links and quotes.

Sexus (Rosy Crucifixion, Book 1) QUOTE - "It was there like a rusty nail in a log thrown up on a deserted beach during a wintry storm. I can't express it better. You walk along the beach, the air is tangy, your spirits are high, you think clearly -- not always brilliantly -- but clearly. Then the log, a phenomenal part of the substantial world: it lies there, full of experience, full of mystery. Some man hammered that nail in somewhere, sometime, somehow. There was a reason for doing it. He was making a ship for other men to sail in. Building ships was his life-work -- and his own destiny as well as the destiny of his children went into every stroke of the hammer. Now the log lies there, and the nail is rusty, but Christ, it's more than just a rusty nail -- or else everything is crazy and meaningless..."

Plexus (Rosy Crucifixion, Book 2) QUOTE - "The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnified world in itself." AND - "It isn't age which makes us wise. Nor even experience, as people pretend. It's the quickness of the sprit." AND - "There are only two classes in this world -- and in every world-- the quick and the dead. For those who cultivate the spirit nothing is impossible. For the others, everything is impossible, or incredible, or futile." AND - "... if one is at all intelligent and sensitive, one naturally ends up in the world of art."

	Nexus (Rosy Crucifixion, Book 3) QUOTE - "Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself."

Tropic of Cancer QUOTE - "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!"

Tropic of Capricorn QUOTE - "Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so. You no longer believe in reality but in thinking." AND - "People would have appreciated me precisely because they would not have understood; but they would have understood that I was not to be understood." AND - "The first word any man writes when he has found himself, his own rhythm, which is the life rhythm, is Yes!" AND - "To be generous is to say Yes before the man even opens his mouth. To say Yes you have to be first a surrealist or a Dadaist, because you have understood what it means to say No."

Stand Still Like the Hummingbird QUOTE - "Contrary to what the unthinking believe, it is tradition which nurtures change, tradition which nurtures revolution, tradition which nurtures freedom of expression." AND - "Conditions being what they are, the young have every right to be pessimistic, rebellious and thoroughly disinterested in the empty promises of their governing bodies." AND - "Life does not begin in some remote, ideal world, some paradisiacal hereafter; it begins and ends here, wherever we are, in whatever circumstances. Three-dimensional beings that we are, we are nevertheless capable of living in multiple dimensions. That is the meaning of life, that is the meaning of life, that it is infinitely variable, inexhaustible, inextinguishable."

Colossus of Maroussi QUOTE - "The task of genius, and man is nothing if not genius, is to keep the miracle alive, to live always in the miracle, to make the miracle more and more miraculous, to swear allegiance to nothing, but live only miraculously, think only miraculously, die miraculously." AND - "Every discovery is mysterious in that it reveals what is so unexpectedly immediate, so close, so long and intimately known." AND - "I have always felt that the art of telling a story consists in so stimulating the listener's imagination that he drowns himself in his own reveries long before the end." AND - "The fight is not against disease: disease is a by-product. The enemy of man is not germs, but man himself, his pride, his prejudices, his stupidity, his arrogance."

	Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch QUOTE - "In America, I have long observed, one lives exposed to all comers. One is expected to live thus or be regarded as a crank. Only in Europe do writers live behind garden walls and locked doors."

The Books in my Life QUOTE - "It must be, I assume, that an appeal made to one's soul is final and irrevocable. And it is with the soul that we grasp the essence of another being, not with the mind, not even with the heart." AND - "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." AND - "If the questioning faculty is not dead, if the sense of wonder is not atrophied, if there be real hunger and not mere appetite or craving, one cannot help but read as he runs. The whole universe must then become an open book." AND - "What could be more useless, more a waste of time and energy than a college thesis?"

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May 2001