Djuna Barnes Quotes

76 Sourced Quotes

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
An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 toward the nearest school.

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

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
But the great doctor, he's a divine idiot and a wise man. He closes one eye, the eye that he studied with, and putting his finger on the arteries of the body says: "God whose roadway this is, has given me permission to travel on it also," which, Heaven help the patient, is true...

Djuna Barnes
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.

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
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
She chuckled now and again at a joke, but it was the amused grim chuckle of a person who looks up to discover that they have coincided with the needs of nature in a bird.

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
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?

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

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

Djuna Barnes
Morbid? You make me laugh. This life I write and draw and portray is life as it is, and therefore you call it morbid. Look at my life. Look at the life around me. Where is this beauty that I am supposed to miss? The nice episodes that others depict? Is not everything morbid? I mean the life of people stripped of their masks. Where are the relieving features? Often I sit down to work at my drawing board, at my typewriter. All of a sudden my joy is gone. I feel tired of it all because, I think, "What's the use?" Today we are, tomorrow dead. We are born and don't know why. We live and suffer and strive, envious or envied. We love, we hate, we work, we admire, we despise. … Why? And we die, and no one will ever know that we have been born.
When asked why she is so dreadfully morbid

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

Djuna Barnes
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.

Djuna Barnes
From the mingled passions that made up his past, out of diversity of bloods, from the crux of a thousand impossible situations, Felix had become the accumulated and single — the embarrassed.

Djuna Barnes
When she smiled the smile was only in the mouth and a little bitter: the face of an incurable yet to be stricken with its malady.

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

Djuna Barnes
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
Nora robbed herself for everyone; incapable of giving herself warning, she was continually turning about to find herself diminished. Wandering people the world over found her profitable in that she could be sold for a price forever, for she carried her betrayal money in her own pocket.

Djuna Barnes