Djuna Barnes Quotes

76 Sourced Quotes

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

Djuna Barnes
Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity. There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against our souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations.

Djuna Barnes
She was always holding God's bag of tricks upside down.

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

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

Djuna Barnes
Somewhere beneath her hurried curse,
A corpse lies bounding in a hearse;
And friends and relatives disperse,
And are not stirred.

Djuna Barnes
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.

Djuna Barnes
What turn of card, what trick of game
Undiced?
And you we valued still a little
More than Christ.

Djuna Barnes
That priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.

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

Djuna Barnes
Ravelling grandly into vice
Dropping crooked into rhyme.
Slipping through the stitch of virtue,
Into crime.

Djuna Barnes
One sees you sitting in the sun
Asleep;
With the sweeter gifts you had
And didn't keep,
One grieves that the altars of
Your vice lie deep.

Djuna Barnes
Someday beneath some hard
Capricious star —
Spreading its light a little
Over far,
We'll know you for the woman
That you are.

Djuna Barnes
Ah God! she settles down we say;
It means her powers slip away
It means she draws back day by day
From good or bad.

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
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
Even the contemplative life is only an effort... to hide the body so the feet won't stick out.

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

Djuna Barnes
When she fell in love it was with a perfect fury of accumulated dishonesty; she became instantly a dealer in second-hand and therefore incalculable emotions.

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

Djuna Barnes
That woman... would use the third-rising of a corpse for her ends.

Djuna Barnes
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.

Djuna Barnes
She had the fluency of tongue and action meted out by divine providence to those who cannot think for themselves.

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

Djuna Barnes