How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time but Timelessness. (1.3)
Right off the bat, Henry makes it clear that things are a changing. It seems like he's trying to escape the responsibilities of time and progress. But, um, is that possible?
Quote #2
We stand of five minutes and devour centuries. (1.36)
Wait, what? Modernists aren't always the easiest to decode in terms of their musings on time, and here, Miller seems to be manipulating time in some strange way. He is always in the past even as he is writing in the present. Not exactly logical, but it's what he believes.
Quote #3
Nothing is proposed that can last more than twenty-four hours. We are living a million lives in the space of a generation. (1.39)
Time seems to have sort of collapsed or folded or done something science fictiony. According to Miller, everything is changing so quickly that you never stand in one place. By not putting any faith in tradition, Miller is again getting all Modernist on us.
Quote #4
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. (2.13)
Henry thinks that most men are basically sissies. No one has the courage to call things what they are. Well, except him, of course.
Quote #5
How the hell can a man write when he doesn't even know where he's going to sit the next half hour? (2.29)
Henry definitely lives moment to moment. His life is spontaneous and unpredictable, so all that matters is having the time and space to write. But wait? Does he have the time and space to write? How come we never see it happening?
Quote #6
How long this lasts I have no idea; I have lost all sense of time and place. And what seems like an eternity there follows an interval of semiconsciousness. (6.16)
Henry pretty much functions in a daze, and it makes us seriously question his reliability as a narrator. It also makes it hard for us, as readers, not to feel a little dazed ourselves.
Quote #7
India's enemy is the time spirit, the hand which cannot be turned back. (7.41).
Okay, this one is a little mysterious, but Miller had a real beef with how the West had destroyed India. You may not get that information here, but it's useful to know that he thought India, which had once been a center of spiritual enlightenment, had become morally and spiritually bankrupt. Thanks a lot, West.
Quote #8
In that moment I lost completely the illusion of time and space: the world unfurled its drama simultaneously along a meridian which had no axis (7.44).
By now, we know that Miller isn't exactly "with us" in the psychological sense. He believes that time is just a construct we impose on things to make sense of the order of our lives. Of course, he has transcended such suffocating beliefs.
Quote #9
They look so absolutely peaceful and contented, as if they had been dozing there for years, that suddenly it seems to me as if we had been standing in this room, in exactly this position, for an incalculably long time, that it was a pose we had struck in a dream from which we never emerged, a dream which the least gesture, the wink of an eye even, will shatter. (7.86)
Walking into Van Norden's new hotel room is like walking into a time capsule. Miller feels that he has no sense of time, nothing to anchor him to the present.
Quote #10
The trouble is I can hardly remember what [Mona] looks like, nor even how it feels to have my arms around her. Everything that belongs to the past seems to have fallen into the sea (1.135)
This is depressing, don't you think? That said, maybe his problem is that he has been with so many women that it's all become one big blur. We don't know exactly how much time has passed since he saw his wife, but he seems to have no connection to her—or to the past—at all.