Henry Miller to Anais Nin-

It is your weakness, if I may say so delicately, to lose faith at the wrong moment. I beg you, be firm. Part of the act of creating is in discovering your own kind. They are everywhere. But don't look for them in the wrong places.

Lady Chatterley's Lover

The opening paragraph of Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence:

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

Anais, Anais, Anais

"When you live closely to individual dramas you marvel that we do not have continuous war, knowing what nightmares human beings conceal, what secret obsessions and hidden cruelties.

I felt I had not shared in the hatreds, angers, and love of destruction, but that I would share in the punishment. But I knew the origin of war, which was in each of us, and I knew that our concept of hero was outdated, that the modern hero was the one who would master his own neurosis so that it would not become universal, who would struggle with his myths, who would know that he himself created them, who would enter the labyrinth and fight the monster. This monster who sleeps at the bottom of his own brain."

Henry Miller wrote my artist/life statement and didn’t tell me til now. Bastard. I love you.

Learning to Ride, 2006

"And as the train stops, I put my foot down and my foot has put a deep big hole in the dream... I have gained nothing by the enlargements of my world: on the contrary, I have lost. I want to become more and more childish and to pass beyond childhood in the opposite direction. I want to go exactly contrary to the normal line of development, pass into a super-infantile realm of being which will be absolutely crazy and chaotic but not crazy and chaotic as the world about me. I want to pass the responsibility of fatherhood to the irresponsibility of the anarchic man who cannot be coerced nor wheedled nor cajoled nor bribed nor traduced. I want to take my guide as Oberon the night rider who under the spread of his black wings eliminated both the beauty and the horror of the past: I want to flee towards a perpetual dawn with a swiftness and relentlessness that leaves no room for remorse, regret of repentance. I want to outstrip the inventive man who is a curse to the earth in order to stand once again before an impassable deep which not even the strongest wigs will enable be to treverse. Even if I must become a wild and natural park inhabited only by idle dreamers, I must not stop to rest here in the ordered fatuity of responsible adult life. I must do this in remembrance of a life beyond all comparison with the life which was promised me, in remembrance of the life of a child who was strangled and stifled by the mutual consent of those who had surrendered. Everything which the fathers and the mothers created I disown. I am going back to a world even smaller than the old Hellenic world, going back to a world which I can always touch with outstretched arms, the world of what I know and see and recognize from moment to moment. Any other world is meaningless to me and alien to me and hostile to me. In retroversing the first bright world which I knew as a child I wish not to rest there but to muscle back to a still brighter world from which I must have escaped. What this world looks like I do not know, now am I sure that I will find it, but it is my world and nothing else intrigues me."

-Henry Miller

Sleepless in Seattle

"Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.
I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension.
But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living."

-from Diary of Anais Nin Volume I

O.Wilde

"There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands."

Oscar Wilde from Lady Windermere's Fan