Djuna Barnes Quotes & Sayings

Now I see that night does something to a person's identity, even when asleep. — Djuna Barnes

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

Every bed she leaves, without caring, fills her heart with peace and happiness. She has made her 'escape' again. That's why she can't 'put herself in another's place,' she herself is the only 'position'; so she resents it when you reproach her with what she had done. She knows she is innocent because she can't do anything in relation to anyone but herself. You almost caught hold of her, but she put you cleverly away by making you the Madonna. What was your patience and terror worth all these years if you couldn't keep them for her sake? — Djuna Barnes

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

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

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

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

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

Man is born as he dies, rebuking cleanliness; — Djuna Barnes

Life, the permission to know death. — Djuna Barnes

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

The ballerina on perfected toe
Spins to the axis of a fortitude
That is the sum of all her yesterdays. — Djuna Barnes

Everything we can't bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once. — Djuna Barnes

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

What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? — Djuna Barnes

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

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties. — Djuna Barnes

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

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. — Djuna Barnes

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

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

No man need curing of his individual sickness; his universal malady is what he should look to. — Djuna Barnes

A Girl is gone! A Girl is lost! A simple Rustic Maiden but Yesterday swung upon the Pasture Gate, with Knowledge nowhere, yet is now, to-day, no better than her Mother, and her Mother's Mother before her! Soiled! Despoiled! Handled! Mauled! Rumpled! Rummaged! Ransacked! No purer than Fish in Sea, no sweater than Bird on Wing, no better than Beasts of Earth! — Djuna Barnes

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

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

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

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

Those who turn the day into night, the young, the drug addict, the profligate, the drunken and that most miserable, the lover who watches all night long in fear and anguish. These can never again live the life of the day. When one meets them at high noon they give off, as if it were a protective emanation, something dark and muted. The light does not become them any longer. They begin to have an unrecorded look. It is as if they were being tried by the continual blows of an unseen adversary. — Djuna Barnes

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

To our friends,' he answered, 'we die every day, but to ourselves we die only at the end. — Djuna Barnes

In the passage of their lives together every object in the garden, every item in the house, every word they spoke, attested to their mutual love, the combining of their humuours ... When the time came that Nora was alone most of the night and part of the day, she suffered from the personality of the house, the punishment of those who collect their lives together. Unconsciously at first, she went about disturbing nothing; then she became aware that her soft and careful movements were the outcome of an unreasoning fear - if she disarranged anything Robin might become confused - might lose the scent of home. — Djuna Barnes

Robin is not in your life, you are in her dream, you'll never get out of it. And why does Robin feel innocent? Every bed she leaves, without caring, fills her heart with peace and happiness. She has made her "escape" again. That's why she can't "put herself in another's place," she herself is the only "position"; so she resents it when you reproach her with what she had done. She knows she is innocent because she can't do anything in relation to anyone but herself. — Djuna Barnes

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

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

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

No man really wants his freedom. He gets a habit as quickly as possible
it is a form of immortality — Djuna Barnes

I've seen death and I didn't like it. — Djuna Barnes

Man has no foothold that is not also a bargain. So be it! — Djuna Barnes

To love without criticism is to be betrayed. — Djuna Barnes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact. — Djuna Barnes

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

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

Only the impossible lasts forever. — Djuna Barnes

So love, when it has gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight. — Djuna Barnes

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

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

Destiny and history are untidy. — Djuna Barnes

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

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

What do you listen to in the Protestant church? To the words of a man who has been chosen for his eloquence - and not too eloquent either, mark you, or he get's the bum's rush from the pulpit, for fear that in the end he will use his golden tongue for political ends. For a golden tongue is never satisfied until it has wagged itself over the destiny of a nation, and this the church is wise enough to know. — Djuna Barnes

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

The doctor lifted the bottle. "Thank you," said Felix. "I never drink spirits."
"You will," said the doctor. — Djuna Barnes

there's something wrong with any art that makes a woman all bust — Djuna Barnes

... 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

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

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

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

Suffering is the decay of the heart; all that we have loved becomes the 'forbidden' when we have not understood it all ... — Djuna Barnes

Man makes his history with the one hand and "holds it up" with the other. — Djuna Barnes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There goes the dismantled - Love has fallen off her wall. A religious woman," he thought to himself, "without the joy and safety of the Catholic faith, which at a pinch covers up the spots on the wall when the family portraits take a slide; take that safety from a woman," he said to himself, quickening his step to follow her, "and love gets loose and into the rafters. She sees her everywhere," he added, glancing at Nora as she passed into the dark. "Out looking for what she's afraid to find - Robin. There goes mother of mischief, running about, trying to get the world home. — Djuna Barnes

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them. — Djuna Barnes

There was some derangement in her equilibrium that kept her immune from her own decent — Djuna Barnes

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

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

I was doing well enough until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes. — Djuna Barnes

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

Looking down the barrel of your eye, I see the body of a Bloody Cinderella looking back. — Djuna Barnes

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

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy. — Djuna Barnes

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

To think is to be sick... — Djuna Barnes

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

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

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

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

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

She said to herself: 'Is not the gown the natural raiment of extremity? What nation, what religion, what ghost, what dream has not worn it - infants, angels, priests, the dead; why - should not the doctor, in the grave dilemma of his alchemy, wear his dress?' She thought: 'He dresses to lie beside himself, who is so constructed that love, for him, can be only something special; in a room that giving back evidence of his occupancy, is as mauled as the last agony. — Djuna Barnes

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

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

Those long remembered can alone claim to be long forgotten. — Djuna Barnes

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

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

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

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

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