Djuna Barnes Quotes

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.

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

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 may be in torment. We will find no comfort until the night melts away; until the fury of the night rots out its fire.

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

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.

To love without criticism is to be betrayed.

"Sometimes to be utterly innocent," he went on, "would be to be utterly unknown, particularly to oneself."

Nightwood is demanding. You can slide into it, because the prose has a narcotic quality, but you can’t slide over it. The language is not about conveying information; it is about conveying meaning.

She was broad and tall, and though her skin was the skin of a child, there could be seen coming, early in her life, the design that was to be the weather-beaten grain of her face, that wood in the work; the tree coming forward in her, an undocumented record of time.

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

The excess of his sensibilities may preclude his mind. His sanity is an unknown room: a known room is always smaller than an unknown

God,' she cried, 'what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn't tell me the truth because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you prepare for that? Everything we can't bear in the world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.... There's something evil in me that loves evil and degradation — purty's black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love; or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar's door?

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

THE MAN: We will bury her deep beneath our hearts, yours and mine — for her soul is a flower, and that we may not touch; but her spirit is wine, and that we may drink, that she may have her shroud.

So the reason for our cleanliness becomes apparent; cleanliness is a form of apprehension; our faulty racial memory is fathered by fear. Destiny and history are untidy; we fear memory of that disorder.