Nightwood Quotes

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

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

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

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

“I was doing well enough until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes.”
― 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

“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

“We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality. We sleep in a long reproachful dust against ourselves. We are full to the gorge with our own names for misery. Life, the pastures in which the night feeds and prunes the cud that nourishes us to despair. Life, the permission to know death. We were created that the earth might be made sensible of her inhuman taste; and love that the body might be so dear that even the earth should roar with it. 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, Nightwood

“To think is to be sick...”
― 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

“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

“To our friends,' he answered, 'we die every day, but to ourselves we die only at the end.”
― 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

“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

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

“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

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

“For a lover who dies, no matter how forgotten, will take somewhat of you to the grave.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“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, Nightwood

“I might have known better, nothing is what everybody wants, the world runs on that law. Personally, if I could, I would instigate Meat-Axe Day, and out of the goodness of my heart I would whack your head off with a couple of others. Every man should be allowed one day and a hatchet just to ease his heart.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“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, Nightwood

“Our bones only ache while the flesh is on them. Stretch it 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, Nightwood

“The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a 'picture' forever arranged, is, for the contemplative mind, the chiefest danger. Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person's every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial memory; as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear,stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will become myth; as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hunger pressing its breast to its prey.
Such a woman is the infected carrier of the past; before her the structure of our head and jaws ache -- we feel that we could eat her, she who is eaten death returning, for only then do we put our face close to the blood on the lips of our forefathers.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“So love, when it has gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“Those long remembered can alone claim to be long forgotten.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

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

“...the people... they are church-broken, nation-broken -- they drink and pray and piss in the one place. Every man has a house-broken heart except the great man. The people love their church and know it, as a dog knows where he was made to conform, and there he returns by his instinct.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“Robin told only a little of her life, but she kept repeating in one way or another her wish for a home, as if she were afraid she would be lost again, as if she were aware, without conscious knowledge, that she belonged to Nora, and that if Nora did not make it permanent by her own strength, she would forget.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood