What strikes me now as the most wonderful proof of my fitness, or unfitness, for the times is the fact that nothing people were writing or talking about had any real interest for me. Only the object haunted me, the separate, detached, insignificant thing. It might be a part of the human body or a staircase in a vaudeville house; it might be a smokestack or a button I had found in the gutter. Whatever it was it enabled me to open up, to surrender, to attach my signature. To the life about me, to the people who made up the world I knew, I could not attach my signature. I was as definitely outside their world as a cannibal is outside the bounds of civilized society. I was filled with a perverse love of the thing-in-itself - not a philosophic attachment, but a passionate, desperately passionate hunger, as if in this discarded, worthless thing which everyone ignored there was contained the secret of my own regeneration. . Henry Miller
About This Quote

In the quote above, it seems that the author of the book was not a person who "haunts" a part of a human body or a staircase in a vaudeville house. Instead, he was one who is filled with "perverse love" for the object in question. In other words, this person is obsessed with an object which no one else takes much interest in. The author also expresses his desire to consume the object itself, rather than simply use it as a means to an end.

This is a very disturbing thought, because it implies that this person does not care for this object in the same way that another person would. Rather, he seems to want to consume this object even if it hurts him in some way.

Source: Tropic Of Capricorn

Some Similar Quotes
  1. When someone loves you, the way they talk about you is different. You feel safe and comfortable. - Jess C. Scott
  2. As if you were on fire from within. The moon lives in the lining of your skin. - Pablo Neruda
  3. The saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all. Passion and satisfaction go hand in hand, and without them, any happiness is only temporary, because there's nothing to make it last. - Nicholas Sparks
  4. Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love - Unknown
  5. By the time you swear you're his, Shivering and sighing. And he vows his passion is, Infinite, undying. Lady make note of this --One of you is lying. - Dorothy Parker
More Quotes By Henry Miller
  1. What's a fuck when what I want is love?
  2. Let me be, was all I wanted. Be what I am, no matter how I am.
  3. Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
  4. The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
  5. Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is.
Related Topics