Djuna Barnes > Quotes

“I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

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

“The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

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

“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, Nightwood

“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, Nightwood

“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

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

“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

“Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

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

“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

“Oh," he cried. "A broken heart have you! I have falling arches, flying dandruff, a floating kidney, shattered nerves and a broken heart!”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“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, Nightwood

“I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“To think is to be sick...”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“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, Nightwood

“From the half-open doors of this chiffonier hung laces, ribands, stockings, ladies' underclothing and an abdominal brace, which gave the impression that the feminine finery had suffered venery.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“And once Father Lucas said to me, 'Be simple, Matthew, life is a simple book, and an open book, read and be simple as the beasts in the field; just being miserable isn't enough -- you've got to know how.' So I got to thinking and I said to myself, 'This is a terrible thing that Father Lucas has put on me -- be simple like the beasts and yet think and harm nobody.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorous glowing about the circumference of a body of water - as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations - the troubling structure of the born somnambule.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“Her heavy peasant face was fringed by a bang of red hair like a woolen table-spread, a color at once strange and attractive, an obstinate color, a color that seemed to make Lena feel something alien and bad-tempered had settled over her forehead...”
― 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, Nightwood