Tropic of Capricorn (Miller, Henry)

by Henry Miller

It was a bad experience because it taught me how to live a lie. It taught me to smile when I didn’t want to smile, to work when I didn’t believe in work, to live when I had no reason to go on living. Even when I had forgotten her I still retained the trick of doing what I didn’t believe in.

Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous and patient.

sounds pretty enabling of problematic behaviors if you ask me

Perhaps it was the fact of having no father that pushed him along the road toward the discovery of the self, which is the final process of identification with the world and the realization consequently of the uselessness of ties.

Father, sleep, I beg you, for we who are awake are boiling in horror. . . .

what does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?

It has been that way ever since the Greeks—a blind fuck in the mud and then a quick spawn and then death.

But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn’t Bach or Beethoven; music is the can opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there’s a roof to your being.

It’s terrible to be civilized, because when you come to the end of the world you have nothing to support the terror of loneliness.

Suffering is futile, my intelligence told me over and over, but I went on suffering voluntarily.

It seems to me that everything dates from that aborted affair.

I would like to suffocate with grief but instead I give birth to a rock.