Tropic of Cancer quotes
Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller
with introduction by Karl Shapiro
and preface by Anais Nin (but supposidly actually written by Henry Miller himself)
Introduction
"it is poetry only because it rises above literature and because it sometimes ends up in bibles"
"Let's assemble a bible from his work, I said, and put one in every hotel room in America, after removing the Gideon Bibles and placing them in the laundry chutes"
"We can call Miller the greatest living Patagonian."
"The fact is that there isn't any subject and Miller is its poet."
"I have often thought that the Germans make the best Americans, though they certainly make the worst Germans."
"Morally I regard Miller as a holy man, as most of his adherents do---Ghandi with a penis."
"he is screamingly funny without making fun of sex"
"There is only one aim in life and that is to live it. In America it has become impossible, except for a few lucky or wise people, to live one's life; consequently the poets and artists tend to move to the fringes of society."
""The world problem is the individual problem; if the individual is at peace, has happiness, has great tolerance, and an intense desire to help, then the world problem as such ceases to exist. You consider the world problem before you have considered your own problem. Before you have established peace and understanding in your own hearts and in your own minds you desire to establish peace and tranquility in the minds of others, in your nations and in your states; whereas peace and understanding only come when there is understanding; certainy and strength in yourselves (Krishnamurti (Miller?))""
""We create our fate," says Miller. And better still: "Forget, forgive, renounce, abdicate." And "scrap the past instantly." Live the good life instantly; it's now or never, and always has been."
""How can one know the splendor and fullness of youth if one's energies are consumed in combating the errors and falsities of parents and ancestors? Is youth to waste its strength unlocking the grip of death? Is youth's only mission on earth to rebel, to destroy, to assassinate? Is youth only to be offered up as a sacrifice? What of the dreams of youth? Are they always to be regarded as follies? Are they to be populated only with chimeras? ...Stifle or deform youth's dreams and you destroy the creator (Miller).""
Preface
"The book is sustained on its own axis by the pure flux and roation of events. Just as there is no central point, so also there is no question of heroism or of strugle since there is no question of will, but only as obedience to flow."
"The humilations and defeats, given with a primitive honesty, end not in frustration, despair, or futility, but in hunger, an ecstatic, devouring hunger---for more life"
"If there is here revealed the capacity to shock, to startle the lifeless ones from their profound slumber, let us congratulate ourselves; for the tragedy of our world is precisely that nothing any longer is capable of rousing it from its lethargy. No more violent dreams, no refreshment, no awakening. In the anaesthesai produced by self-knowledge, life is passing, art is passing, slipping from us: we are drifting with time and our fight is with shadows. We need a blood transfusion."
Tropic of Cancer
"We are are allone here and we are dead (1)."
"The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock steop, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change (1)."
"I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive (1)."
"This then? This is not a book. This is a libel, sladner, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this ia prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty...what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse....
To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing (2)"
"There are intervals, but they are between dreams, and there is no consciousness of them left. The world around me is dissolving, leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away...I am thinking that when the great silence descends upon all and everywhere musicl will at last triumph. When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written (2)."
"...your womb turned inside out (5)."
"ovaries incandescent (5)."
"I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world (6)."
"I am suffocated by it. No one to whom I can communicate evern a fraction of my feelings... (6)."
"She used candles, Roman candles, and door knobs (7)."
"We have so many points in common that it is like loking at myself in a cracked mirror (9)."
"I recall distrinctly how I enjoyed my suffering. It was like taking a cub to bed with you. Once in a while he clawed you---and then you really were frightened. Ordinarily you had no fear---you could always turn him loose, or chop his head off (9)."
"It seems whenever I go there is drama. People are like lice---they get uner your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It's in the blood now---misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch---until there's no skin left. However, the effect upon me is exhilarating. Instaed of being discouraged, or depressed, I enjoy it. I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death (12)."
"...about the women who look so attractive from behind, and when they turned round---wow, syphilis! (23)."
""Great God! what have I turned into? What right have you people to clutter up my life, steal my time, probe my soul, suckle my thoughts, have me for your companion, confidant, and information bureau?" (65)"
""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, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company" (66)"
"In that monent I lost completely the illusion of time and space: the world unfurled its drama simultaneously along a meridian which had no axis. In this sort of hair-trigger eternity I felt that everything was justified, supremely justified; I felt the wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and wrack; I felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow in blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding itself out with pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that dribbles away in dirty handkerchiefs. On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama (96)"
"For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduece himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideoousness of reality. Everything is endured---disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui---in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable (96)"
"It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone thatn at this very moment (98)"
"At this very moment, in the quiet dawn of a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime and distress? (98)"
"I have found God, but he is insufficent. I an only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. That world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself (99)"
""She wanted to moven in here. Imagine that! Asking me if I loved her. I didn't even know her name. I never know their names...I don't want to" (102)"
""I'm actually beginning to hate cunt!" (102)"
""All I ask of life," he says, "is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt." (103)"
""The trouble is, you see, I can't fall in love. I'm too much of egoist. Women only help me to dream, that's all. It's a vice, like drink or opium. I've got to have a new one every day; if I don't I get morbid. I think too much. Sometimes I'm amazed at myself, how quick I pull it off---and how little it really means." (103)"
""There's something depraved about screwing a woman who doesn't give a fuck about it." (105)"
""Sometimes I lie in bed dreaming about the past and it's so vivid to me that I have to shake myself in order to realize where I am." (129)"
""A good lay isn't enough for me apparently...they want your soul too..." (129)"
""I get so goddamned mad at myself that I could kill myself...and in a way, that's what I do every time I have an orgasm. For one second I like to obliterate myself." (130)"
""The less you notice them the more they chase after you. There's something perverse about women...they're all masochists at heart." (130)"
"As long as that spark of passion is missing there is no human significance in the performance (144)"
"if you don't get to bed before the birds begin to screech it's useless to go to bed at all (161)"
"As soon as the baby is born and handd over to the authorities she will go back to her trade, she says. She makes hats (162)"
"...there is the trembling glitter of a world which demands only the presense of the female to crystallize the most fugitive aspirations (166)"
"When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into the deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deper than regret or pain or sorrow; it is the abyss in which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand (178)"
"My world of human beings had perished; I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter lanuage compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort (184)"
"...a mask that is twisted by a vacant smile (184)"
""Defendez-vous contre le syphilis!" (185)"
"It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead think like the moon (185)"
"It's best ot keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a wak moment. LIke that, you imagine it's always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cowas and sheep and tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman or best. It doesn't exist, America. It's a name you given to an abstract idea... (208)"
"Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, youc an't wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked (209)"
""So you see why once in a while I must let myself be sucked by a Lesbian..." (238)"
"Just as the people protect themselves against the invasion of their privacy, by their high walls, their bolts and shutters, their growling, evil-tongued, slatternly concierges, so they have learned to protect themselves against the cold and heat of a bracing, vigorous climate. They have fortified themselves: protection is the keyword. Protection and security. In order that they may rot in comfort (240)"
"At the bottom of every frozen heart there is a drop or two of love---just enough to feed the birds (242)"
"Are these men and women, I ask myself, or are these shadows, shadows of puppets dangled by invisible strings? They move in freedom apparently, but they have nowhere to go. In one realm only are they free and there they may roam at will---but they have not yet learned how to take wing. So far there have been no dreams that have taken wing. Not one man has been born light enough, gay enough, to leave the earth! The eagles who flapped their mighty pinions for a while came crashing heavily to earth. They made us dizzy with the flap and whir of their wings. Stay on earth, you eagles of the future! The heavens have been explored and they are empty. And what lies under the earth is empty too, filled with bones and shadows. Stay on the earth and swim another few hundred thousand years! (245-6)"
"If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on. When a man appears the world bears down on him and breaks his back. There are always too many rotten pilars left standing, too much festering humanity for man to bloom. The superstructure is a lie and the foundation is a huge quaking fear. If at intervals of centuries there does appear a man with a desperate, hungry lok in his eye, a man who would turn the world upside down in order to create a new race, the love that he brings to the world is turned to bile and he becomes a scourge (248)"
"If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world (249)"
"Love and hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust---what are these amidst the fornications of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when ight presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster (250)"
"If I am inhuman it is because my world has slopped over its human bounds, because to be human seems like a poor, sorry, miserable affair, limited by the senses, restricted by moralities and codes, defined by platitudes and isms. I am pouring the juice of the grape down my gullet and I find my wisdom in it, but my wisdom is not born of the grape, my intoxication owes nothing to wine... (256)"
"I believe that today more than ever 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 (257)"
"...the world seems to be falling to pieces. It's a smile thrown across an abyss. The whole stinking civilized world lies like a quagmire at the bottom of the pit, and over it, like a mirage, hovers this wavering smile (283-4)"
Notable Words
officiates
liquescent
crepuscular melange
Anjou
verdigris
gorgonzola
ilex
acromegaly
gesticulating
unctuously
abstemiously
acquiescent
supine
peregrination
emaciated
inveigled
priapic
batik
palatable
excelsior
fecundated
incongruous
fecundity
myriad
ubiquitous
succored
attenuated
odalisque
espied
lugubrious
propensity
chthonian
orthography
desultory
amelioration
cajole
begrudge
somnolence
fuliginous
diapasons
seraglios
madrepore fructifying
centrifugal
metallurgical
periphery
odaliques
malachie
jasper
gangrened
palaver
imputed
tenuous
atavistic
omnipresent
patchouli
epithets
jocosely
echolalia
esoteric
ichor
rectitude
ablation
insipid
bilious-green
indefatigable
magnanimous
divagations
alacrity
execrable
indolent
burgeois
gaiety
defalcations
pemmican
chthonian
vermouth cassis
vacuity
blotte
acuity
alarum
diapason
flatulence
calumniators
imbued
crepuscular
epicene caterwauling
sojourn
somnolent
metallurgical
pederasts
quincuncial
dissensions
inveigled
diatribe
by Henry Miller
with introduction by Karl Shapiro
and preface by Anais Nin (but supposidly actually written by Henry Miller himself)
Introduction
"it is poetry only because it rises above literature and because it sometimes ends up in bibles"
"Let's assemble a bible from his work, I said, and put one in every hotel room in America, after removing the Gideon Bibles and placing them in the laundry chutes"
"We can call Miller the greatest living Patagonian."
"The fact is that there isn't any subject and Miller is its poet."
"I have often thought that the Germans make the best Americans, though they certainly make the worst Germans."
"Morally I regard Miller as a holy man, as most of his adherents do---Ghandi with a penis."
"he is screamingly funny without making fun of sex"
"There is only one aim in life and that is to live it. In America it has become impossible, except for a few lucky or wise people, to live one's life; consequently the poets and artists tend to move to the fringes of society."
""The world problem is the individual problem; if the individual is at peace, has happiness, has great tolerance, and an intense desire to help, then the world problem as such ceases to exist. You consider the world problem before you have considered your own problem. Before you have established peace and understanding in your own hearts and in your own minds you desire to establish peace and tranquility in the minds of others, in your nations and in your states; whereas peace and understanding only come when there is understanding; certainy and strength in yourselves (Krishnamurti (Miller?))""
""We create our fate," says Miller. And better still: "Forget, forgive, renounce, abdicate." And "scrap the past instantly." Live the good life instantly; it's now or never, and always has been."
""How can one know the splendor and fullness of youth if one's energies are consumed in combating the errors and falsities of parents and ancestors? Is youth to waste its strength unlocking the grip of death? Is youth's only mission on earth to rebel, to destroy, to assassinate? Is youth only to be offered up as a sacrifice? What of the dreams of youth? Are they always to be regarded as follies? Are they to be populated only with chimeras? ...Stifle or deform youth's dreams and you destroy the creator (Miller).""
Preface
"The book is sustained on its own axis by the pure flux and roation of events. Just as there is no central point, so also there is no question of heroism or of strugle since there is no question of will, but only as obedience to flow."
"The humilations and defeats, given with a primitive honesty, end not in frustration, despair, or futility, but in hunger, an ecstatic, devouring hunger---for more life"
"If there is here revealed the capacity to shock, to startle the lifeless ones from their profound slumber, let us congratulate ourselves; for the tragedy of our world is precisely that nothing any longer is capable of rousing it from its lethargy. No more violent dreams, no refreshment, no awakening. In the anaesthesai produced by self-knowledge, life is passing, art is passing, slipping from us: we are drifting with time and our fight is with shadows. We need a blood transfusion."
Tropic of Cancer
"We are are allone here and we are dead (1)."
"The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock steop, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change (1)."
"I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive (1)."
"This then? This is not a book. This is a libel, sladner, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this ia prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty...what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse....
To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing (2)"
"There are intervals, but they are between dreams, and there is no consciousness of them left. The world around me is dissolving, leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away...I am thinking that when the great silence descends upon all and everywhere musicl will at last triumph. When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written (2)."
"...your womb turned inside out (5)."
"ovaries incandescent (5)."
"I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world (6)."
"I am suffocated by it. No one to whom I can communicate evern a fraction of my feelings... (6)."
"She used candles, Roman candles, and door knobs (7)."
"We have so many points in common that it is like loking at myself in a cracked mirror (9)."
"I recall distrinctly how I enjoyed my suffering. It was like taking a cub to bed with you. Once in a while he clawed you---and then you really were frightened. Ordinarily you had no fear---you could always turn him loose, or chop his head off (9)."
"It seems whenever I go there is drama. People are like lice---they get uner your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It's in the blood now---misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch---until there's no skin left. However, the effect upon me is exhilarating. Instaed of being discouraged, or depressed, I enjoy it. I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death (12)."
"...about the women who look so attractive from behind, and when they turned round---wow, syphilis! (23)."
""Great God! what have I turned into? What right have you people to clutter up my life, steal my time, probe my soul, suckle my thoughts, have me for your companion, confidant, and information bureau?" (65)"
""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, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company" (66)"
"In that monent I lost completely the illusion of time and space: the world unfurled its drama simultaneously along a meridian which had no axis. In this sort of hair-trigger eternity I felt that everything was justified, supremely justified; I felt the wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and wrack; I felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow in blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding itself out with pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that dribbles away in dirty handkerchiefs. On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama (96)"
"For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduece himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideoousness of reality. Everything is endured---disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui---in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable (96)"
"It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone thatn at this very moment (98)"
"At this very moment, in the quiet dawn of a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime and distress? (98)"
"I have found God, but he is insufficent. I an only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. That world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself (99)"
""She wanted to moven in here. Imagine that! Asking me if I loved her. I didn't even know her name. I never know their names...I don't want to" (102)"
""I'm actually beginning to hate cunt!" (102)"
""All I ask of life," he says, "is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt." (103)"
""The trouble is, you see, I can't fall in love. I'm too much of egoist. Women only help me to dream, that's all. It's a vice, like drink or opium. I've got to have a new one every day; if I don't I get morbid. I think too much. Sometimes I'm amazed at myself, how quick I pull it off---and how little it really means." (103)"
""There's something depraved about screwing a woman who doesn't give a fuck about it." (105)"
""Sometimes I lie in bed dreaming about the past and it's so vivid to me that I have to shake myself in order to realize where I am." (129)"
""A good lay isn't enough for me apparently...they want your soul too..." (129)"
""I get so goddamned mad at myself that I could kill myself...and in a way, that's what I do every time I have an orgasm. For one second I like to obliterate myself." (130)"
""The less you notice them the more they chase after you. There's something perverse about women...they're all masochists at heart." (130)"
"As long as that spark of passion is missing there is no human significance in the performance (144)"
"if you don't get to bed before the birds begin to screech it's useless to go to bed at all (161)"
"As soon as the baby is born and handd over to the authorities she will go back to her trade, she says. She makes hats (162)"
"...there is the trembling glitter of a world which demands only the presense of the female to crystallize the most fugitive aspirations (166)"
"When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into the deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deper than regret or pain or sorrow; it is the abyss in which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand (178)"
"My world of human beings had perished; I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter lanuage compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort (184)"
"...a mask that is twisted by a vacant smile (184)"
""Defendez-vous contre le syphilis!" (185)"
"It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead think like the moon (185)"
"It's best ot keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a wak moment. LIke that, you imagine it's always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cowas and sheep and tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman or best. It doesn't exist, America. It's a name you given to an abstract idea... (208)"
"Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, youc an't wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked (209)"
""So you see why once in a while I must let myself be sucked by a Lesbian..." (238)"
"Just as the people protect themselves against the invasion of their privacy, by their high walls, their bolts and shutters, their growling, evil-tongued, slatternly concierges, so they have learned to protect themselves against the cold and heat of a bracing, vigorous climate. They have fortified themselves: protection is the keyword. Protection and security. In order that they may rot in comfort (240)"
"At the bottom of every frozen heart there is a drop or two of love---just enough to feed the birds (242)"
"Are these men and women, I ask myself, or are these shadows, shadows of puppets dangled by invisible strings? They move in freedom apparently, but they have nowhere to go. In one realm only are they free and there they may roam at will---but they have not yet learned how to take wing. So far there have been no dreams that have taken wing. Not one man has been born light enough, gay enough, to leave the earth! The eagles who flapped their mighty pinions for a while came crashing heavily to earth. They made us dizzy with the flap and whir of their wings. Stay on earth, you eagles of the future! The heavens have been explored and they are empty. And what lies under the earth is empty too, filled with bones and shadows. Stay on the earth and swim another few hundred thousand years! (245-6)"
"If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on. When a man appears the world bears down on him and breaks his back. There are always too many rotten pilars left standing, too much festering humanity for man to bloom. The superstructure is a lie and the foundation is a huge quaking fear. If at intervals of centuries there does appear a man with a desperate, hungry lok in his eye, a man who would turn the world upside down in order to create a new race, the love that he brings to the world is turned to bile and he becomes a scourge (248)"
"If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world (249)"
"Love and hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust---what are these amidst the fornications of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when ight presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster (250)"
"If I am inhuman it is because my world has slopped over its human bounds, because to be human seems like a poor, sorry, miserable affair, limited by the senses, restricted by moralities and codes, defined by platitudes and isms. I am pouring the juice of the grape down my gullet and I find my wisdom in it, but my wisdom is not born of the grape, my intoxication owes nothing to wine... (256)"
"I believe that today more than ever 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 (257)"
"...the world seems to be falling to pieces. It's a smile thrown across an abyss. The whole stinking civilized world lies like a quagmire at the bottom of the pit, and over it, like a mirage, hovers this wavering smile (283-4)"
Notable Words
officiates
liquescent
crepuscular melange
Anjou
verdigris
gorgonzola
ilex
acromegaly
gesticulating
unctuously
abstemiously
acquiescent
supine
peregrination
emaciated
inveigled
priapic
batik
palatable
excelsior
fecundated
incongruous
fecundity
myriad
ubiquitous
succored
attenuated
odalisque
espied
lugubrious
propensity
chthonian
orthography
desultory
amelioration
cajole
begrudge
somnolence
fuliginous
diapasons
seraglios
madrepore fructifying
centrifugal
metallurgical
periphery
odaliques
malachie
jasper
gangrened
palaver
imputed
tenuous
atavistic
omnipresent
patchouli
epithets
jocosely
echolalia
esoteric
ichor
rectitude
ablation
insipid
bilious-green
indefatigable
magnanimous
divagations
alacrity
execrable
indolent
burgeois
gaiety
defalcations
pemmican
chthonian
vermouth cassis
vacuity
blotte
acuity
alarum
diapason
flatulence
calumniators
imbued
crepuscular
epicene caterwauling
sojourn
somnolent
metallurgical
pederasts
quincuncial
dissensions
inveigled
diatribe