Djuna Barnes Men Quotations

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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