Djuna Barnes Quotes

Every bed she leaves, without caring, fills her heart with peace and happiness. She has made her 'escape' again. That's why she can't 'put herself in another's place,' she herself is the only 'position'; so she resents it when you reproach her with what she had done. She knows she is innocent because she can't do anything in relation to anyone but herself. You almost caught hold of her, but she put you cleverly away by making you the Madonna. What was your patience and terror worth all these years if you couldn't keep them for her sake?

THE MAN: What was it she said, ‘Everything we are denied lives in us, and some day I’ll kill all my life that lives in other things only.’ [He begins to weep softly.] And it’s music will be looking for its song, now she’s dead, and it’s many an eve will come down without color, now she’s no more. Come, let us to the funeral.

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

Matthew,' she said, 'have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?'
For a moment he did not answer. Taking up the decanter he held it to the light.
'Robin can go anywhere, do anything,' Nora continued, 'because she forgets, and I nowhere because I remember.' She came toward him. 'Matthew,' she said, 'you think I have always been like this. Once I was remorseless, but this is another love — it goes everywhere; there is no place for it to stop — it rots me away.

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.

Her heavy peasant face was fringed by a bang of red hair like a woolen table-spread, a color at once strange and attractive, an obstinate color, a color that seemed to make Lena feel something alien and bad-tempered had settled over her forehead...

His sanity is an unknown room: a known room is always smaller than an unknown.

Nora aveva la faccia di tutti coloro che amano gli altri - una faccia che sarebbe diventata cattiva quando avrebbe scoperto che amare senza riserve è essere traditi.

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

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

What do you listen to in the Protestant church? To the words of a man who has been chosen for his eloquence — and not too eloquent either, mark you, or he get’s the bum’s rush from the pulpit, for fear that in the end he will use his golden tongue for political ends. For a golden tongue is never satisfied until it has wagged itself over the destiny of a nation, and this the church is wise enough to know.

There was some derangement in her equilibrium that kept her immune from her own decent

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

How cruel is reason! How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is meditation! How subtle is the lack of reason!

The doctor lifted the bottle. “Thank you,” said Felix. “I never drink spirits.”

“You will,” said the doctor.