Black Spring Quotes

“the world is the mirror of myself dying.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“Tomorrow you may bring about the destruction of your world. Tomorrow you may sing in Paradise above the smoking ruins of your world-cities. But tonight I would like to think of one man, a lone individual, a man without name or country, a man whom I respect because he has absolutely nothing in common with you - MYSELF. Tonight I shall meditate upon that which I am.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“I used to think then that all the tragic events of life were written down in books and that what went on outside was just diluted crap.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“Her eyes were so big and bright, as if they saw more than they could comprehend. Bright with terror, and beneath the terror a limitless confusion. That’s what made them so beautifully bright. You have to be crazy to see things so lucidly, so all at once. If you’re great you can stay that way and people will believe in you, swear by you, turn the world upside down for you. But if you’re only partly great, or just a nobody, then what happens to you is lost.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“The dreamers dream from the neck up, their bodies securely strapped to the electric chair. To imagine a new world is to live it daily, each thought, each glance, each step, each gesture killing and recreating, death always a step in advance. To spit on the past is not enough. To proclaim the future is not enough. One must act as if the past were dead and the future unrealizable. One must act as if the next step were the last, which it is. Each step forward is the last, and with it a world dies, one’s self included. We are here of the earth never to end, the past
never ceasing, the future never beginning, the present never ending. The never-never world which we hold in our hands and see and yet is not ourselves. We are that which is never
concluded, never shaped to be recognized, all there is and yet not the whole, the parts so much greater than the whole that only God the mathematician can figure it out.”
― henry miller, Black Spring

“No more peeping through keyholes! No more mas turbating in the dark! No more public confessions! Unscrew the doors from their jambs! I want a world where the vagina is represented by a crude, honest slit, a world that has feeling for bone and contour, for raw, primary colors, a world that has fear and respect for its animal origins. I’m sick of looking at cunts all tickled up, disguised, deformed, idealized. Cunts with nerve ends exposed. I don’t want to watch young
virgins masturbating in the privacy of their boudoirs or biting their nails or tearing their hair or lying on a bed full of bread crumbs for a whole chapter. I want Madagascan funeral poles, with animal upon animal and at the top Adam and Eve, and Eve with a crude, honest slit between the legs. I want hermaphrodites who are real hermaphrodites, and not make-believes walking around with an atrophied penis or a dried-up cunt. I want a classic purity, where dung is dung and angels are angels. The Bible a la King James, for example. Not the Bible of Wycliffe, not the Vulgate, not the Greek, not the Hebrew, but the glorious, death-dealing Bible that was created when the English
language was in flower, when a vocabulary of twenty thousand words sufficed to build a monument for all time. A Bible written in Svenska or Tegalic, a Bible for the Hottentots or the Chinese, a Bible that has to meander through the trickling sands of French is no Bible-it is a counterfeit and a fraud. The King James Version was created by a race of bone-crushers. It revives the primitive mysteries, revives rape, murder, incest, revives epilepsy, sadism,
megalomania, revives demons, angels, dragons, leviathans, revives magic, exorcism, contagion, incantation, revives fratricide, regicide, patricide, suicide, revives hypnotism, anarchism, somnambulism, revives the song, the dance, the act, revives the mantic, the chthonian, the arcane, the mysterious, revives the power, the evil, and the glory that is God. All brought into the
open on a colossal scale, and so salted and spiced that it will last until the next Ice Age.
A classic purity, then-and to hell with the Post Office authorities! For what is it enables the classics to live at all, if indeed they be living on and not dying as we and all about us are dying? What preserves them against the ravages of time if it be not the salt that is in them? When I read Petronius or Apuleius or Rabelais, how close they seem! That salty tang! That odor of the menagerie! The smell of horse piss and lion’s dung, of tiger’s breath and elephant’s hide. Obscenity, lust, cruelty, boredom, wit. Real eunuchs. Real hermaphrodites. Real pricks. Real cunts. Real banquets! Rabelais rebuilds the walls of Paris with human cunts. Trimalchio tickles his own throat, pukes up his own guts, wallows in his own swill. In the amphitheater, where a big, sleepy pervert of a Caesar lolls dejectedly, the lions and the jackals, the hyenas, the tigers, the spotted leopards are crunching real human boneswhilst the coming men, the martyrs and imbeciles, are walking up the golden stairs shouting Hallelujah!”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“I remember that just as I was about to cross the border they asked me what I had to declare and, like an idiot, I answered: "I want to declare that I am a traitor to the human race.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“I am a man of the old world, a seed that was transplanted by the wind, a seed which failed to blossom in the mushroom oasis of America. I belong on the heavy tree of the past. My allegiance, physical and spiritual, it is with the men of Europe, those who were once Franks, Gauls, Vikings, Huns, Tatars, what not. The climate for my body and soul is here where there is quickness and corruption. I am proud not to belong in this century.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“For in Mexico, ladies and gentlemen, it's always high noon and what glows is fuchsia and what's dead is dead and no feather-dusters.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“Когато всяко нещо е изтърпяно докрай, няма смърт и няма разкаяние, нито съществува мнима пролет; всеки изживян момент разкрива един още по-обширен и по-необятен хоризонт, от който няма друго спасение, освен да живееш.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“For me the book is the man and my book is the man I am, the confused man, the negligent man, the recklass man, the lusty, obscene, boisterous, thoughtful, scrupulous, lying, diabolically thruthful man that I am.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“فمن أجل تذكر الحلم على المرء أن يحافظ على عينيه مغلقتين لا تتزحزحان. إذ تكفي أقل حركة حتى ينهار البناء كله”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“Always a good dodge to simplify your problem by removing it.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“Надо быть сумасшедшим, чтобы видеть вещи так ясно, все разом.”
― Генри Миллер, Черная весна

“En la juventud éramos íntegros y el terror y el dolor del mundo nos penetraron por completo. No había una clara separación entre la alegría y la pena: se fundían en una sola cosa, al igual que nuestras horas de lucidez se funden con el sueño y el dormir. Nos levantamos por la mañana siendo unos seres, y por la noche, completamente ahogados, bajamos a un mar empuñando las estrellas y la fiebre del día.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“One passes imperceptibly from one scene, one age, one life to another. Suddenly, walking down the street, be it real or be it a dream, one realizes for the first time that the years have flown, that all this has passed forever and will live on only in memory; and then the memory turns inward with a strange, clutching brilliance and one goes over these scenes and incidents perpetually, in dream and reverie, while walking a street, while lying with a woman, while reading a book, while talking to a stranger . . . suddenly, but always with terrific insistence and always with terrific accuracy, these memories intrude, rise up like ghosts and permeate every fiber of one's being. Hencefoward everything moves on shifting levels—our thoughts, our dreams, our actions, our whole life. A parallelogram in which we drom from one platform of our scaffold to another. Henceforward we walk split into myriad fragments, like an insect witha hundred feet, a centipede with soft-stirring feet that drinks in the atmosphere; we walk with sensitive filaments that drink avidly of past and future, and all things melt into music and sorrow; we walk against a united world, asserting our dividedness. All things, as we walk, splitting with us into a myriad iridiscent fragments. The great fragmentation of maturity. The great change. In youth we were whole and the terror and pain of the world penetrated us through and through. There was no sharp separation between joy and sorrow: the fused into one, as our waking life fuses with dream and sleep. We rose one being in the morning and at night we went down into an ocean, drowned out completely, clutching the stars and the fever of the day.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“I am a man of God and a man of the Devil. To each his due. Nothing eternal, nothing absolute. Before me always the image of the body, our triune god of penis and testicles. On the right, God the Father; on the left and hanging a little lower, God the Son; and between and above them the Holy Ghost. I can never forget that this holy trinity is man-made, that it will undergo infinite changes-but as long as we come out of wombs with arms and legs, as long as there are stars above us to drive us mad and grass under our feet to cushion the wonder in us, just so long will this body serve for all the tunes that we may whistle.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“No more peeping through keyholes! No more masturbating in the dark! No more public confessions! Unscrew the doors from their jambs! I want a world where the vagina is represented by a crude, honest slit, a world that has feeling for bone and contour, for raw, primary colors, a world that has fear and respect for its animal origins. I’m sick of looking at cunts all tickled up, disguised, deformed, idealized. Cunts with nerve ends exposed. I don’t want to watch young virgins masturbating in the privacy of their boudoirs or biting their nails or tearing their hair or lying on a bed full of bread crumbs for a whole chapter.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“For me the book is the man and my book is the man I am, the confused man, the negligent man, the reckless man, the lusty, obscene, boisterous, thoughtful, scrupulous, lying, diabolically thruthful man that I am.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“Here there is buried legend after legend of youth and melancholy, of savage nights and mysterious bosoms dancing on the wet mirror of the pavement, of women chuckling softly as they scratch themselves, of wild sailors’ shouts, of long queues standing in front of the lobby, of boats brushing each other in the fog and tugs snorting furiously against the rush of tide while up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“When a portrait commences badly it's because you're not describing the woman you have in mind: you are thinking more about those who are going to look at the portrait than about the woman who is sitting for you.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“A simple phrase may record a year's struggle.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“Mắt của cô thật to và sáng, như thể chúng nhìn thấy nhiều hơn chúng có thể hiểu được. Sáng lên với kinh hoàng, và ở bên dưới sự kinh hoàng là sự lúng túng vô bờ bến. Đó là thứ làm cho chúng trông thật sáng. Bạn phải bị điên để nhìn được mọi thứ thật rõ ràng, thật cùng một lúc. Nếu bạn vĩ đại bạn có thể giữ nguyên như thế và người ta sẽ tin vào bạn, sẽ thề bằng tên bạn, sẽ đảo lộn thế giới cho bạn. Nhưng nếu bạn chỉ hơi hơi vĩ đại, hoặc không là gì cả, thì thứ xảy ra với bạn là lạc lối.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“[...] с ледяным джазом в крови [...]”
― Генри Миллер, Черная весна

“Каждая глава книги, написанная на воздухе, сгущает кровь; её музыка заглушает дикое беспокойство, стоящее в атмосфере. Ночь опускается внезапно, словно раскат грома, укладывает меня прямо на мостовую пешеходной дорожки, в конечном счете ведущей в никуда, но четко размеченной светящимися стрелками, на всем протяжении которых нет ни одного знака остановки и ни одного поворота назад.”
― Генри Миллер, Черная весна

“Каждый человек - его собственная цивилизованная пустыня, остров самого себя, на котором он терпит кораблекрушение: о счастье, относительном или абсолютном, не может быть и речи.”
― Генри Миллер, Черная весна

“Y entonces llega un momento en el que, de repente, todo parece del revés. Vivimos en la mente, en ideas, en fragmentos. Ya no nos embebemos más en la salvaje y lejana música de las calles: solamente recordamos.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“Uno pasa imperceptiblemente de una escena, una edad, una vida a otra.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“Nimalo se, kažem, ne može nauditi velikoj knjizi ako se ponese u zahod. Samo beznačajne knjige trpe zbog toga. Samo beznačajne knjige služe brisanju guzice. Takva je knjiga Mali Cezar koja je sad prevedena na francuski i koja je izišla u biblioteci Passions. Dok okrećem stranice te knjige, čini mi se da sam opet kod kuće i da čitam naslove u novinama, da slušam one proklete radio aparate, da se vozim u starim krntijama, da pijem jeftini džin, da guram kukuruzni klip u dupe prostitutkama djevicama, da vješam Crnce i žive ih spaljujem. Da čovjek dobije sraćku. A to isto vrijedi za Atlantic M o n t h 1 y ili za bilo koji drugi mjesečnik, za Aldousa Huxleyja, Gertrudu Stein, Sinclaria Lewisa, Hemingwaya, Dos Passosa, Dreisera itd, itd... Ne čujem nikakvo zvono da zvoni u meni kad donesem te ptičice u WC. Povučem lančić i odoše u kanal. Niz Seinu pa u Atlantski ocean. Možda će za godinu dana opet izroniti — na obalama Coney Islan-da ili Midland Beacha ili Miamija, s mrtvim meduzama, puževima, račićima, rabljenim prezervativima, ružičastim toaletnim papirom, jučerašnjim novostima, sutrašnjim samoubojstvima ...
str. 58-59”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring