"I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed."
— Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)

"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

"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 (Nightwood)

""God, children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!""
— Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)

"Let us put it the other way, the Lutheran or Protestant church versus the Catholic. The Catholic is the girl that you love so much that she can lie to you, and the Protestant is the girl that loves you so much that you can lie to her, and pretend a lot that you do not feel."
— 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

"Her heavy peasant face was fringed by a bang of red hair like a woollen table-spread, a colour at once strange and attractive, an obstinate colour, a colour that seemed to make Lena feel something alien and bad-tempered had settled over her forehead..."
— Djuna Barnes

""What people! All queer in a terrible way. There were a couple of queer good people once in this world—but none of you," he said, addressing the room, "will ever know them. You think you are all studded with diamonds, don't you? Well, part the diamonds and you'll find slug's meat. My God," he said, turning around, "when I think!" He began to pound the table with his glass."
— Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)

"I tell you, Madame, if one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say 'Love' and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog."
— Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)