Djuna Barnes Quotes

The truth is how you say it, and to be 'one's self' is the most shocking custom of all.

Why is it that whenever I hear music I think I’m a bride?

We are beginning to wonder whether a servant girl hasn't the best of it after all. She knows how the salad tastes without the dressing, and she knows how life's lived before it gets to the parlor door.

Youth is cause, effect is age; so with the thickening of the neck we get data.

And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?

Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.

There's something evil in me that loves evil and degradation--purity's black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love; or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar's door?

New York rose out of the water like a great wave that found it impossible to return again and so remained there in horror, peering out of the million windows man had caged it with.

You beat the liver out of a goose to get a pâté; you pound the muscles of a man's cardia to get a philosopher.

None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.

Matthew,' she said, 'have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?' For a moment he did not answer. Taking up the decanter he held it to the light. 'Robin can go anywhere, do anything,' Nora continued, 'because she forgets, and I nowhere because I remember.' She came toward him. 'Matthew,' she said, 'you think I have always been like this. Once I was remorseless, but this is another love — it goes everywhere; there is no place for it to stop — it rots me away.

The very condition of Woman is so subject to Hazard, so complex, and so grievous, that to place her at one moment is but to displace her at the next.

One must not look inward too much, while the inside is yet tender. I do not wish to frighten myself until I can stand it.

A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.

Una's face was an unbroken block of calculation, saving where, upon her upper lip, a little down of hair fluttered. Yet it gave one an uncanny feeling. It made one think of a tassel on a hammer.

I can draw and write, and you'd be foolish not to hire me.

I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.

Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature.

Yes, we who are full to the gorge with misery should look well around, doubting everything seen, done, spoken, precisely because we have a word for it, and not its alchemy

My war brought me many things; let yours bring you as much. Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself. No one will be much or little except in someone else's mind, so be careful of the minds you get into, and remember Lady Macbeth, who had her mind in her hand. We can't all be as safe as that.

The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.

Destiny and history are untidy.

I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not ravished

Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the 'findings' in a tomb. As in one will be charted the taken place of the body, the raiment, the utensils necessary to its other life, so in the heart of the lover will be traced, as an indelible shadow, that which he loves.

We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.

Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.

Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.

Madness to us means reversion; to such people as Una and Lena it meant progression. Now their uncle had entered into a land beyond them, the land of fancy. For fifty years he had been as they were, silent, hard-working, unimaginative. Then all of a sudden, like a scholar passing his degree, he had gone up into another form.

Life is painful, nasty and short.. in my case it has only been painful and nasty.

When autumn shadows throw their patterns across the land, they are not the images of fragile, dying leaves, not the bared arms of lofty elms, not shadows of a fading summer; but swinging shapes as of books upon a strap, of round and square boxes held under an arm, of hurrying little people heading towards the nearest school.

One cup poured into another makes different waters; tears shed by one eye would blind if wept into another's eye. The breast we strike in joy is not the breast we strike in pain; any man's smile would be consternation on another's mouth.

No one will be much or little except in someone else's mind, so be careful of the minds you get into.

We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.

For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short; for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.

God, children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!

A man's sorrow runs uphill; true it is difficult for him to bear, but it is also difficult for him to keep.

Too great a sense of identity makes a man feel he can do no wrong. And too little does the same.

I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.

“God,” she cried, “what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn't tell me the truth because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you be prepared for that? Everything we can't bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.”

I've seen death and I didn't like it.

No man needs curing of his individual sickness; his universal malady is what he should look to.

Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.

The heart of the jealous knows the best and most satisfying love, that of the other's bed, where the rival perfects the lover's imperfections.

I couldn't ever boil potatoes over the heat of your affection. Your love would never bridge a gap; it wouldn't even fill up the hole that the mice came through.

When one wants to become cognizant of the color and the texture of the soil, one does not get a ladder; one gets a shovel. When one wants to get into touch with the texture of the universal mind, one does not go to Boston; one goes to the Bowery.

She was nervous about the future; it made her indelicate. She was one of the most unimportantly wicked women of her time --because she could not let her time alone, and yet could never be a part of it. She wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing. She had the fluency of tongue and action meted out by divine providence to those who cannot think for themselves. She was the master of the over-sweet phrase, the over-tight embrace.