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"I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object."
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"It seems to me that the pleasure one feels in a work of art is just one thing that one does not have to explain."
"Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice."
"The cat . . . is for the man who appreciates beauty as the one living force in a blind and purposeless universe."
"The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of all the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of whichher beauty was a part."
"A slight deviation form what we would think of as symmetry gives us a bit more information and the mind seems to enjoy this stimulation because it is always looking for value. Beauty is a slight deviation from expectation."
"Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed."
"No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and honesty are written across her face, she will be beautiful."
"I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That's what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don't see him as a living individual painter any more."
"The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer's perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at."
Explore more quotes by Henry Miller
"Over and over again I have said that there is no way out of the present impasse. If we were wide awake we would be instantly struck by the horrors which surround us ... We would drop our tools, quit our jobs, deny our obligations, pay no taxes, observe no laws, and so on. Could the man or woman who is thoroughly awakened possibly do the crazy things which are now expected of him or her every moment of the day?"
"No man ever puts down what he intended to say... words... are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible."
"Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others - priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior - hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is the artist who has the courage to go against the crowd; he is the unrecognized "hero of our time" - and of all time."
"One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life."
"Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything."
"No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe."
"The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary."
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