Tropic of Cancer

by Henry Miller
United States
26 Dec 1891 // 7 Jun 1980
Writer



Ideas and Action (1)

Still I can't get it out of my mind what a discrepancy there is between ideas and living. A permanent dislocation, though we try to cover the two with a bright awning. And it won't go. Ideas have to ...

I Will Show you a Great Man (2)

Show me a man who over-elaborates and I will show you a great man! What is called their 'overelaboration' is my meat: it is the sign of struggle, it is struggle itself with all the fibers clinging to...

I Need my Freedom (3)

I am a free man ― and I need my freedom. I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, ...

The World Has Been Dying (4)

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. Th...

Man Looks for the Miracle (5)

The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to ac...


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Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller

 

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Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
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