Jump off. You are a protected individual. Do not fear.
Henry MillerRead
It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Writing freely can be therapeutic and fulfilling.
In this quote, Henry Miller expresses the joy and liberation that comes from writing a letter without an obligation or expectation of response. He likens this act to the natural accumulation of water in a reservoir, suggesting that unexpressed thoughts and feelings can build up inside us, and writing serves as a necessary release and a means of personal expression.
Themes
WritingLetterExpressionReleaseCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a workshop about creative writing and self-expression.
More from Henry Miller
All quotes →I saw through to the last sign and symbol, but I could not read her face. I could see only the eyes shining through, huge, fleshy-like luminous beasts, as though I were swimming behind them in the electric effluvia of her incandescent vision.
Henry MillerRead
The essential thing is to WANT to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.
Henry MillerRead
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? What do you take me for? Am I an entertainer on salary, required every evening to play an intellectual farce under your stupid noses? Am I a slave, bought and paid for, to crawl on my belly in front of you idlers and lay at your feet all that I do and all that I know?
Henry MillerRead
We are swimming on the face of time and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown.
Henry MillerRead
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 a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.
Henry MillerRead
Similar quotes
A person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer to have nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden.
Albert CamusRead
The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others - existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.
Honore De BalzacRead
Humans arose ... as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness.
Stephen Jay GouldRead
If you find life absurd, shouldn’t you find death precisely meaningful?
Harry MulischRead
More than ever I find myself in the hands of God. This (illness) is what I have wanted all my life from my youth. But now there is a difference; the initiative is entirely with God. It is indeed a profound spiritual experience to know and feel myself so totally in God’s hands.
Pedro ArrupeRead
After chiding the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort, could not be proved to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past.
Loren EiseleyRead