Djuna Barnes Quotations

The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.

Life is painful, nasty and short.. in my case it has only been painful and nasty.

Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.

New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.

We are beginning to wonder whether a servant girl hasn't the best of it after all. She knows how the salad tastes without the dressing, and she knows how life's lived before it gets to the parlor door.

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.

To love without criticism is to be betrayed.

What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?

The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.

Well, isn't Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else - and must not a waiter be a little less than a waiter to be a good Bohemian?

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.

After all, it is not where one washes one's neck that counts but where one moistens one's throat.

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

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.

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.

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

And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?

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.

Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the 'findings' in a tomb. As in one will be charted the taken place of the body, the raiment, the utensils necessary to its other life, so in the heart of the lover will be traced, as an indelible shadow, that which he loves.

Why is it that whenever I hear music I think I’m a bride?

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them. Stretch it as 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.

No one will be much or little except in someone else's mind, so be careful of the minds you get into...

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

I can draw and write, and you'd be foolish not to hire me.

One must not look inward too much, while the inside is yet tender. I do not wish to frighten myself until I can stand it.

The truth is how you say it, and to be 'one's self' is the most shocking custom of all.

We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.

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.

For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short; for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.

To think is to be sick...

None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.

Life, the permission to know death.

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

Only the impossible lasts forever.

Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.

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.

I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.

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

Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.

Youth is cause, effect is age; so with the thickening of the neck we get data.

Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature.

I've seen death and I didn't like it.

One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.

Una's face was an unbroken block of calculation, saving where, upon her upper lip, a little down of hair fluttered. Yet it gave one an uncanny feeling. It made one think of a tassel on a hammer.

Madness to us means reversion; to such people as Una and Lena it meant progression. Now their uncle had entered into a land beyond them, the land of fancy. For fifty years he had been as they were, silent, hard-working, unimaginative. Then all of a sudden, like a scholar passing his degree, he had gone up into another form ...

When one wants to become cognizant of the color and the texture of the soil, one does not get a ladder; one gets a shovel. When one wants to get into touch with the texture of the universal mind, one does not go to Boston; one goes to the Bowery.

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.

I couldn't ever boil potatoes over the heat of your affection. Your love would never bridge a gap; it wouldn't even fill up the hole that the mice came through ...

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.

Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself.

I'm a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet under a cow pat.

I am not a critic; to me criticism is so often nothing more than the eye garrulously denouncing the shape of the peephole that gives access to hidden treasure.

If Helen of Troy could have been seen eating peppermints out of a paper bag, it is highly probable that her admirers would have been an entirely different class.It is the thing you are found doing while the horde looks on that you shall be loved for - or ignored.

Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on.

Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?

The Seal, she lounges like a bride,Much too docile, there's no doubt;Madame Récamier, on side,(if such she has), and bottom out.

There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole.

In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most truly captured. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time.

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?

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.

God, children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!

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.

Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out.

The whole world is nothing but a noise, as hot as the inside of a tiger's mouth. They call it civilization - that is a lie! But some day you may have to go out, someone will try to take you out, and you will not understand them or what they are saying, unless you understand nothing, absolutely nothing, then you will manage.

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.

Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

Destiny and history are untidy.

I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.

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

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.

I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.

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

Life is painful, nasty and short . . . in my case it has only been painful and nasty.

Well, isn't Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else -- and must not a waiter be a little less than a waiter to be a good Bohemian?