Henry Miller, 1934
Harper 2005
Characters:
p 9
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.I have no money, no resources, no hope. I am the happiest man on earth.
p 11
He puts on that he is a Pole, but he is not of course. He is a Jew, Borowski, and his father was a philatelist. In fact, almost all Montparnasse is Jewish, or half-Jewish, which is worse. There's Carl and Paula, and Cronstadt and Boris, and Tania and Sylvester, and Moldorf and Lucille. All except Fillmore. Henry Jordan Oswald turned out to be a Jew also. Louis Nichols is a Jew. Even Van Norden and Chérie are Jewish. Frances Blake is a Jew, or a Jewess. Titus is a Jew. The Jews are snowing me under. I am writing this for my friend Carl whose father is a Jew. All this is important to understand.
Of them all the loveliest Jew is Tania, and for her sake, I too would become a Jew. Besides, who hates the Jews more than the Jew?
p 53
[With] Claude there was always a certain delicacy, even when she got under the sheets with you. And her delicacy offended. Who wants a delicate whore?
p 151 [proofreader]
The world can blow up —I'll be there just the same to add a comma or a semicolon. I may even touch a little overtime, for with an event like that there's bound to be a final extra.
p 153
In this chtonian world the only thing of importance is orthography and punctuation. It doesn't matter what the nature of the calamity is, only whether it is spelled right.
p 156
That's the first thing that strikes an American woman in Europe —that it's unsanitary. They cannot conceive paradise without modern plumbing.
p 197
After all, despite the fact that he talked incessantly, and usually about himself or the authors he admired slavishly —such birds as Anatole France or Joseph Conrad— he nevertheless made my nights interesting in other ways. [...] That he liked Byron also, and Victor Hugo, one could forgive; he was only a few years out of college and he had plenty of time ahead of him to be cured of such tastes.
p 231-232
Fillmore has bronchitis, the princess has the clap, and I have the piles.
p 241
[Inevitably] there always crept into our discussions the figure of Whitman, that one lone figure which America has produced in the course of her brief life. [...] He was the poet of the Body and the Soul, Whitman. The first and last poet.
p 259
I like the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orenoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouth of the river.
p 262
Blessing the country, blessing the ruler, blessing the firearms and the battleships and the ammunition and the hand grenade.
p 271
I felt free and chained at the same time —like one feels just before election, when all the crooks have been nominated and you are beseeched to vote for the right man.
p 274
He was like an engraving by Albrecht Dürer —a composite of all the dour, sour, morose, bitter, unfortunate, unlucky and introspective devils who compose the pantheon of Germany's medieval knights.
p 283-284
Constipation and freezing of toilet pipes.
p 284
[The veilleur de nuit] is the only human being in the whole institution with whom I feel a kinship. He is a nobody.