Top 95 Djuna Barnes Quotes
#1. 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.
Djuna Barnes
#2. For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short; for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.
Djuna Barnes
#3. It is only by such extreme measures that the average man can remember something long ago; truly, not that he remembers, but that crime itself is the door to an accumulation, a way to lay hands on the shudder of a past that is still vibrating.
Djuna Barnes
#4. Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself.
Djuna Barnes
#5. A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.
Djuna Barnes
#6. Man is the only thing that has no further use after something goes amiss.
Djuna Barnes
#7. there's something wrong with any art that makes a woman all bust
Djuna Barnes
#8. New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.
Djuna Barnes
#9. 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.
Djuna Barnes
#10. Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.
Djuna Barnes
#11. After all, it is not where one washes one's neck that counts but where one moistens one's throat.
Djuna Barnes
#12. I was doing well enough until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes.
Djuna Barnes
#13. She was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden, that symbolizes the weather through which it has endured, and is not so much the work of man as the work of wind and rain and the herd of the seasons, and though formed in men's image is a figure of doom.
Djuna Barnes
#14. 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
#16. The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.
Djuna Barnes
#17. Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature.
Djuna Barnes
#18. Why is it that whenever I hear music I think I'm a bride?
Djuna Barnes
#19. No man really wants his freedom. He gets a habit as quickly as possible
it is a form of immortality
Djuna Barnes
#20. No man need curing of his individual sickness; his universal malady is what he should look to.
Djuna Barnes
#21. To love without criticism is to be betrayed.
Djuna Barnes
#22. Life is painful, nasty and short ... in my case it has only been painful and nasty.
Djuna Barnes
#23. Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.
Djuna Barnes
#24. Suffering is the decay of the heart; all that we have loved becomes the 'forbidden' when we have not understood it all ...
Djuna Barnes
#25. 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
#26. Looking down the barrel of your eye, I see the body of a Bloody Cinderella looking back.
Djuna Barnes
#27. Man makes his history with the one hand and "holds it up" with the other.
Djuna Barnes
#28. ... everything we do is decent when the mind begins to forget - the design of life; and good when we are forgotten - the design of death.
Djuna Barnes
#29. 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
#30. 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.
Djuna Barnes
#31. There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole.
Djuna Barnes
#32. Youth is cause, effect is age; so with the thickening of the neck we get data.
Djuna Barnes
#33. 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
#34. There was some derangement in her equilibrium that kept her immune from her own decent
Djuna Barnes
#35. 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.
Djuna Barnes
#36. In Nora's heart lay the fossil of Robin, intaglio of her identity, and about it for its maintenance ran Nora's blood. Thus the body of Robin could never be unloved, corrupt or put away. Robin was now beyond timely changes, except in the blood that animated her.
Djuna Barnes
#37. 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.
Djuna Barnes
#38. 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
#39. The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.
Djuna Barnes
#40. 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.
Djuna Barnes
#41. Have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?
Djuna Barnes
#44. No matter where and when you meet him you feel that he has come from some place-no matter from what place he has come-some country that he has devoured rather than resided in, some secret land that he has been nourished on but cannot inherit, for the Jew seems to be everythere from nowhere.
Djuna Barnes
#45. Now I see that night does something to a person's identity, even when asleep.
Djuna Barnes
#46. The doctor lifted the bottle. "Thank you," said Felix. "I never drink spirits."
"You will," said the doctor.
Djuna Barnes
#47. I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.
Djuna Barnes
#48. Man is born as he dies, rebuking cleanliness;
Djuna Barnes
#49. 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?
Djuna Barnes
#50. 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.
Djuna Barnes
#51. 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.
Djuna Barnes
#52. We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
Djuna Barnes
#53. The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.
Djuna Barnes
#55. A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.
Djuna Barnes
#56. One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.
Djuna Barnes
#58. He knew at the same time that this stricture of acceptance (by which what we must love is made into what we can love) would eventually be a part of himself
Djuna Barnes
#59. I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.
Djuna Barnes
#60. 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
#61. No one will be much or little except in someone else's mind, so be careful of the minds you get into ...
Djuna Barnes
#62. An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.
Djuna Barnes
#63. Everything we can't bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.
Djuna Barnes
#64. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?
Djuna Barnes
#65. Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won't stick out.
Djuna Barnes
#66. Too great a sense of identity makes a man feel he can do no wrong. And too little does the same.
Djuna Barnes
#67. 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.
Djuna Barnes
#68. 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 ...
Djuna Barnes
#69. Those long remembered can alone claim to be long forgotten.
Djuna Barnes
#70. I can draw and write, and you'd be foolish not to hire me.
Djuna Barnes
#71. 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
#72. The truth is how you say it, and to be 'one's self' is the most shocking custom of all.
Djuna Barnes
#73. 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
#74. And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
Djuna Barnes
#75. 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
#76. Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?
Djuna Barnes
#77. So love, when it has gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight.
Djuna Barnes
#78. He is not like other children, not cruel, or savage. For this very reason he is called 'strange.' A child who is mature, in the sense that the heart is mature, is always, I have observed, called deficient.
Djuna Barnes
#79. The ballerina on perfected toe
Spins to the axis of a fortitude
That is the sum of all her yesterdays.
Djuna Barnes
#80. A Jew's undoing is never his own, it is God's; his rehabilitation is never his own, it is a Christian's.
Djuna Barnes
#81. Man has no foothold that is not also a bargain. So be it!
Djuna Barnes
#82. 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.
Djuna Barnes
#83. Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on.
Djuna Barnes
#84. His sanity is an unknown room: a known room is always smaller than an unknown.
Djuna Barnes
#85. Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.
Djuna Barnes
#86. 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.
Djuna Barnes
#87. God, children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!
Djuna Barnes
#88. I'm a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet under a cow pat.
Djuna Barnes
#89. 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
#90. 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.
Djuna Barnes
#92. I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.
Djuna Barnes
#93. To our friends,' he answered, 'we die every day, but to ourselves we die only at the end.
Djuna Barnes
#94. Guido had lived as all Jews do, who, cut off from their people by accident or choice, find that they must inhabit a world whose constituents, being alien, force the mind to succumb to an imaginary populace.
Djuna Barnes
#95. 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
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