Tropic of Capricorn (Miller, Henry)

by Henry Miller

Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty,

I never helped any one expecting that it would do any good; I helped because I was helpless to do otherwise.

work—which is nothing, at bottom, but the doctrine of inertia.

I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live—if what others are doing is called living—but to express myself.

There are no “facts”—there is only the fact that man, every man everywhere in the world, is on his way to ordination.

Keep off the grass! That’s the motto by which people live.

In the belly of the trombone lies the American soul farting its contented heart out.

No form, no image, no architecture, only concentric flights of sheer madness.

but it is infinitely better, while attending death, to live in a state of grace and natural bewilderment.

Sometimes while a person is talking to me I step out of my shoes and, like a plant drifting with the current, I begin the voyage of my rootless self.

The man whom God loves is the onion with a million skins. To shed the first layer is painful beyond words; the next layer is less painful, the next still less, until finally the pain becomes pleasurable, more and more pleasurable, a delight, an ecstasy. And then there is neither pleasure nor pain, but simply darkness yielding before the light. And as the darkness falls away the wound comes out of its hiding place: the wound which is man, man’s love, is bathed in light. The identity which was lost is recovered. Man walks forth from his open wound, from the grave which he had carried about with him so long.

She awoke cursing the sun, cursing the glare of reality.

Be forbearing when you compare us With those who were the perfection of order. We who everywhere seek adventure, We are not your enemies. We would give you vast and strange domains Where flowering mystery waits for him would pluck it.

Even if there were a job for me to fill I couldn’t accept it, because what I needed was not work but a life more abundant.

it. If you know what freedom means, absolute freedom and not a relative freedom, then you must recognize that this is the nearest to it you will ever get. If I am against the condition of the world it is not because I am a moralist—it is because I want to laugh more.

All this active life, preceding the final act of desperation, led me from doubt to doubt, blinding me more and more to the real self which, like a continent choked with the evidences of a great and thriving civilization, had already sunk beneath the surface of the sea. The colossal ego was submerged, and what people observed moving frantically above the surface was the periscope of the soul searching for its target.

I was like an equals sign through which the algebraic swarm of humanity was passing.

sleep is an even greater danger than insomnia.

Action is important, even if it entails futile activity.

One should not be drowned in the human tidal wave, even for the sake of becoming a Master.

Suffering has never taught me a thing; for others it may still be necessary, but for me it is nothing more than an algebraic demonstration of spiritual inadaptability.

Nothing was worse, I learned as a child, than to do a good deed without reason.

I made the most astounding sacrifices, only to find that they were of no value. Of what use was it to prove that I could be what was expected of me when I did not want to be any of these things? Every time you come to the limit of what is demanded of you, you are faced with the same problem—to be yourself!

You live in the fruits of your action and your action is the harvest of your thought.

Henceforth I shall be double-jointed and double-sexed. Everything that happens will happen twice. I shall be as a visitor to this earth, partaking of its blessings and carrying off its gifts. I shall neither serve nor be served. I shall seek the end in myself.

Equilibrium is no longer the goal—the scales must be destroyed.