Djuna Barnes Short Quotes

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The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

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

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

Djuna Barnes
That priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.

Djuna Barnes
One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Djuna Barnes