Djuna Barnes Quotes

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

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.

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

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

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.

The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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

Destiny and history are untidy.

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.

Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.

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?

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.

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

What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.

To love without criticism is to be betrayed.

Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Only the impossible lasts forever.

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?

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