Henry Miller Quotes in Henry & June (1990)

Henry Miller: I'm not a portrait painter.

June Miller: I'll say you're not. Look what you've done to Anais. You make everything ugly! Beauty is a joke for you. You're so negative. You're a failure as a writer. You're not a man, you're a child! You use women! You used me, you fucker!

Henry Miller: AAAHHH!

June Miller: You fucker!

Henry Miller: And that's our task. Liberation. Freedom. Let's toast to Lawrence. Let's toast to our defects. Toast, to our friendship. Drink cold, piss warm.

Henry Miller: Hell of a place you got here, Hugo. Peaceful. Been here long?

Hugo Guiler: Just since the crash.

Henry Miller: Since the crash? How did you live before?

Hugo Guiler: We lived well. This is Henry Miller, the American writer Osborn is putting up. My wife, Anais Nin.

Henry Miller: How are you, Anis?

Hugo Guiler: Eduardo Sanchez, Anais' cousin. Anais, you should read Henry's stuff.

Richard Osborn: For my money, he's got it over D.H. Lawrence.

AnaÔs Nin: I'd love to read your writing.

Richard Osborn: He hasn't been published yet.

Henry Miller: All right, I'll tell you. June appeared like an Angel, and I offered her a fool's faith. She was a taxi dancer. I paid my dime, she put her head on my shoulder, but then the lies began. She told me her mother was a gypsy and her father was a count. Later, I saw a film and realized she swiped her whole childhood right out of the film.

AnaÔs Nin: And so?

Henry Miller: So I married her.

Henry Miller: I feel like the war's over.

Henry Miller: She is my fucking wife.

AnaÔs Nin: You don't understand your own fucking wife.

Henry Miller: I'd believe only in a god that understood how to dance. Isn't that something?

Henry Miller: [narrating] I am fucking you Tania, so that you'll stay fucked. And if you're afraid of being fucked publicly, I'll fuck you privately. I'll tear off a few hairs from your cunt and paste them on Boris's chin. I will bite into your clitoris and spit out two franc pieces.

Henry Miller: Could you loan me five francs to take a taxi to St. Lazare? Now, you know Mona. If I'm not there to meet the boat train, she's liable to turn right around and go back.

[first lines]

Henry Miller: This, then, this is not a movie. This is a libel, slander, defamation of character, a 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'm 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.

M. Le Censeur: He go, uh... over the wall.

Henry Miller: Eh, couldn't he've just gone through the door?

M. Le Censeur: The door is locked by key. Each night. At ten. To avoid the infiltration of women.

Henry Miller: [narrating] It began to have an independent existence, for me too. There was Germaine... and there was that rosebush of hers. I liked them separately and I liked them together.

Carl: [Reading the letter he wrote] You send me golden apples, Irene dear. And gifts of shaggy chestnuts too.

Henry Miller: She hasn't given you anything has she?

Carl: No. But I like the word, shaggy.

Henry Miller: If the lady's any good at all, it's never far from her mind. All you have to do is let *her* know that you know what she's thinking about.

[Last lines]

Henry Miller: [narrating] My thoughts drift out toward the sea, toward the other side, where taking a last look back, I had seen the skyscrapers fading out in a flurry of snowflakes. I see them looming up again, in the same ghostly way as when I left, see the lights creeping through their ribs, and see the whole city spread out from Harlem to the Battery, the streets chocked with ants, the theatres empty. I wonder, in a vague way, whatever happened to my wife. After everything quietly sifted through my head, a great peace came over me. Here, where the river gently winds through the girdle of the hills lies a soil so saturated with the past that however far back the mind roams, one can never detach it from its human background. Christ. Before my eyes, there shimmers such a golden peace that only a neurotic could dream of turning his head away. So quietly flows the Seine, that one hardly notices its presence. It is always there, quiet and unobtrusive, like a great artery running through the human body. In the wonderful peace that falls over me, it seems as if I've climbed to the top of a high mountain. For a little while, I will be able to look around me to take in the meaning of the landscape. Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance, they appear negligible; close up, they're apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything, they need to be surrounded with *sufficient* space. Space even more than time. The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through me. It's past. It's ancient soil. The changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about. Its course is fixed.

Henry Miller: The whale's penis is two meters long, and actually contains bone!

Henry Miller: [looks inside stage coach] Is there a woman in here?

[Indians are looking at and touching Frances clothes and bag inside the stage coach]

Francis Fryer: No sir. Just Indians.