Djuna Barnes quotes

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

#Men #Shadow #Accounts

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

#Past #Legs #Planning

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Flesh #Bones #Ache

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

#Strange #Forgotten #Said

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Curves #Joy #Unendurable

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

#Too Much #Miserable #Made

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.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Jealous #Heart #Imperfection

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

#New York #Cities #Typical

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

#Bad Day #Nasty #Life Is

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

#Breakup #Lying #Love Is

Destiny and history are untidy.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Destiny

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.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Summer #Book #School

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

#Running #Men #Sorrow

Life, the permission to know death.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Aging #Permission

Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Dream #Facts

Only the impossible lasts forever.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Philosophical #Forever #Lasts

To love without criticism is to be betrayed.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Criticism #Betrayed

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

#Humble #Men #Identity

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.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Men #Pounds #Philosopher

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

#Heart #Lasts #Muscles

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 prepare for that? Everything we can't bear in the world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.... There's something evil in me that loves evil and degradation--purty's black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love; or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar's door?
-- Djuna Barnes

#Honesty #Liars #Men

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.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Hazards #Next #Moments

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

#Children #Bed #Riding

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

#People #Nasty #Life Is

To think is to be sick...
-- Djuna Barnes

#Thinking #Sick

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.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Sweet #Thinking #Wicked

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
-- Djuna Barnes

#Giving #Silence #Doe

Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Feet #Effort #Body

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.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Thinking #Light #Robins

A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself - and what is a man's shadow but his upright astonishment?
-- Djuna Barnes

#Men #Shadow #Wells

Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Life Is #You Like It #Loud

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

#Men #Needs #Looks

There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Shattered #Surface

In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most truly captured. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Acceptance #Past #Age

One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Peculiar #Life Is

The Seal, she lounges like a bride,Much too docile, there's no doubt;Madame Récamier, on side,(if such she has), and bottom out.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Doubt #Sides #Docile

Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?
-- Djuna Barnes

#Past #Thinking #Paris

Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Grandmother #Love Is #Suffering

Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Sleep #Demand #Guilty

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

#Data #Age #Causes

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

#Law #Produce #Certainty

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.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Pain #Eye #Men

Man is the only thing that has no further use after something goes amiss.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Men #Use

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 ...
-- Djuna Barnes

#Bridges #Gaps #Potatoes

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.
-- Djuna Barnes

#New York #Men #Water

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.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Boston #Color #Mind

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 ...
-- Djuna Barnes

#Uncles #Mean #Hard Work

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.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Block #Thinking #Hair

The whole world is nothing but a noise, as hot as the inside of a tiger's mouth. They call it civilization - that is a lie! But some day you may have to go out, someone will try to take you out, and you will not understand them or what they are saying, unless you understand nothing, absolutely nothing, then you will manage.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Lying #Civilization #Trying

I've seen death and I didn't like it.
-- Djuna Barnes

If Helen of Troy could have been seen eating peppermints out of a paper bag, it is highly probable that her admirers would have been an entirely different class.It is the thing you are found doing while the horde looks on that you shall be loved for - or ignored.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Class #Different #Bags

I am not a critic; to me criticism is so often nothing more than the eye garrulously denouncing the shape of the peephole that gives access to hidden treasure.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Eye #Giving #Criticism

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

#Writing #Foolish #Draws

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
-- Djuna Barnes

#Doubt #Looks #Gorges

Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Lying #Love Is #Lasts

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

#Mind #Littles #Be Careful

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

#Night #Skins #May

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

#Conclusion #Reader #Careful

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.
-- Djuna Barnes

#War #Hands #Mind

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

#Thinking #Brides

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

#Wind #Skins #Mortality

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.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Wish #Inward #Looks

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

#Self #Truth Is

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.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Taken #Heart #Love Is

I'm a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet under a cow pat.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Humble #Wind #Cows

Well, isn't Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else - and must not a waiter be a little less than a waiter to be a good Bohemian?
-- Djuna Barnes

#Littles #Bohemian #Wells

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Mind #Uncertainty

After all, it is not where one washes one's neck that counts but where one moistens one's throat.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Necks #Throat

The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Mind #Priceless #Misinformation

What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?
-- Djuna Barnes

#Endurance #Ruins #Inequality

This head has risen above its hair in a moment of abandon known only to men who have drawn their feet out of their boots to walk awhile in the corridors of the mind.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Men #Hair #Gnarly

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them. Stretch it as thin as the temple flesh of an ailing woman and still it serves to ache the bone and to move the bone about; and in like manner the night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in a torment. We will find no comfort until the night melts away; until the fury of the night rots out its fire.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Moving #Night #Fire

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.
-- Djuna Barnes

#Girl #Doors #Salad

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?
-- Djuna Barnes

#Honesty #Liars #Doors