Djuna Barnes Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.”
-- Djuna Barnes -
“Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.”
-- Djuna Barnes -
“Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.”
-- Djuna Barnes -
“I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.”
-- Djuna Barnes -
“The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.”
-- Djuna Barnes -
“I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.”
-- Djuna Barnes -
“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 -
“New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.”
-- Djuna Barnes -
“Life is painful, nasty and short.. in my case it has only been painful and nasty.”
-- Djuna Barnes -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.”
-- Djuna Barnes -
“To love without criticism is to be betrayed.”
-- Djuna Barnes -
“Too great a sense of identity makes a man feel he can do no wrong. And too little does the same.”
-- Djuna Barnes -
“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 -
“We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.”
-- Djuna Barnes -
“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 -
“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 -
“God, children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!”
-- Djuna Barnes -
“For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short; for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.”
-- Djuna Barnes -
“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 -
“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 -
“Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out.”
-- Djuna Barnes -
“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 -
“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
