Djuna Barnes Quotes

To think is to be sick...

but this is another love — it goes everywhere; there is no place for it to stop — it rots me away.

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?

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.

One's life is peculiarly one's own when one has invented it.

The wise men say that the remembrance of things past is all that we have for the future, and am I to blame if I've turned up this time as I shouldn't have been, when it was a high soprano I wanted, and deep corn curls to my bum, with a womb as of a fishing schooner? And what do I get but a face on me like an old child's bottom - is that happiness, do you think?

...he is not like other children, not cruel, or savage. For this very reason he is called 'strange.' A child who is mature, in the sense that the heart is mature, is always, I have observed, called deficient.

Suffering is the decay of the heart; all that we have loved becomes the 'forbidden' when we have not understood it all...

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

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.

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

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

The heart of the jealous knows the best and the most satisfying love, that of the other's bed, where the rival perfects the lover's imperfections. Fancy gallops to take part in that duel, unconstrained by any certain articulation of the laws of that unseen game.

Listen! Do things look in the ten and twelve of noon look as they do in the dark? Is the hand, the face, the foot, the same face and hand and foot seen by the sun? For now the hand lies in a shadow; its beauties and its deformities are in a smoke - there is a sickle of doubt across the cheek bone thrown by the hat's brim, so there is half a face to be peered back into speculation. A leaf of darkness has fallen under the chin and lies deep upon the arches of the eyes; the eyes themselves have changed their colour. The very mother's head you swore by in the dock is a heavier head, crowned with ponderable hair.

There goes the dismantled — Love has fallen off her wall. A religious woman,” he thought to himself, “without the joy and safety of the Catholic faith, which at a pinch covers up the spots on the wall when the family portraits take a slide; take that safety from a woman,” he said to himself, quickening his step to follow her, “and love gets loose and into the rafters. She sees her everywhere,” he added, glancing at Nora as she passed into the dark. “Out looking for what she’s afraid to find — Robin. There goes mother of mischief, running about, trying to get the world home.