Tropic of Cancer Study Guide

Tropic of Cancer

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Tropic of Cancer is a novel by Henry Miller which recounts his experiences living in Paris in the 1930s, written in a style that blurs the line between fact and fiction. Miller tells of his travels and interactions with characters such as Fillmore, Mona, Nanantatee, and Tania in this vivid account of living in Paris before WWII. The book, which is notorious for its explicit sex scenes, explores themes of friendship, nationality, poverty, and sexuality.

Tropic of Cancer Quotes

Table of Contents

  • I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.
  • On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses.
  • When you decide to give up the ghost, Everything else follows even in midst of wildest chaos.
  • A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God. This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is 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.
  • For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens. Not one of us is intact, and yet we have in us all the continents and the seas between the continents and the birds of the air. We are going to put it down -- the evolution of this world which has died but which has not been buried.
  • I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death.
  • Still prowling around. Mid-afternoon. Guts rattling. Beginning to rain now. Notre-Dame rises tomb-like from the water. The gargoyles lean far out over the lace facade. They hang there like an idea fixd in the mind of a monomaniac. An old man with yellow whiskers approaches me. Has some Jaworski nonsense in his hand. Comes up to me with his head thrown back and the rain splashing in his face turns the golden sands to mud.
  • Nothing will avail to offset this virus which is poisoning the whole world. America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit.
  • It is not difficult to be alone if you are poor and a failure. An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
  • I've lived out my melancholy youth. I don't give a fuck anymore what's behind me, or what's ahead of me. I'm healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day.
  • All the men she's been with and now you, just you, and the barges going by, masts and hulls, the whole damned current of life flowing through you, through her, through all the guys behind you and after you, the flowers and the birds and the sun streaming in and the fragrance of it choking you, annihilating you.
  • Nobody, so far as I can see, is making use of those elements in the air which give direction and motivation to our lives. Only the killers seem to be extracting from life some satisfactory measure of what they are putting into it. The age demands violence, but we are getting only abortive explosions. Revolutions are nipped in the bud or else succeed too quickly. Passion is quickly exhausted. Men fall back on ideas, comme d'habitude. Nothing is proposed that can last more than twenty four hours. We are living a million lives in the space of a generation. In the study of entomology, or deep sea life, or cellular activity, we derive more...
  • There was a touch of spring in the air, a poisonous, malefic spring that seemed to burst from the manholes. Night after night I had been coming back to this quarter, attracted by certain leprous streets which only revealed their sinister splendor when the light of day had oozed away and the whores commenced to take up their posts.

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