Djuna Barnes Quotes

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

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

Nora will leave that girl some day; but though those two were buried at opposite ends of the earth, one dog will find them both.

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

She said to herself: 'Is not the gown the natural raiment of extremity? What nation, what religion, what ghost, what dream has not worn it — infants, angels, priests, the dead; why — should not the doctor, in the grave dilemma of his alchemy, wear his dress?' She thought: 'He dresses to lie beside himself, who is so constructed that love, for him, can be only something special; in a room that giving back evidence of his occupancy, is as mauled as the last agony.

"None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last. Don't I know that the only way to know evil is through truth? The evil and the good know themselves only by giving up their secret face to face. The true good who meets the true evil (Holy Mother of Mercy! are there any such?) learns for the first time how to accept neither; the face of the one tells the face of the other the half of the story that both forgot. "To be utterly innocent," he went on, "would be to be utterly unknown, particularly to oneself.

A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.

Only the impossible lasts forever; with time, it is made accessible.

The Seal, she lounges like a bride, Much too docile, there's no doubt; Madame Récamier, on side, (if such she has), and bottom out.

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.

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 has, I am now certain, to be a little mad to see into the past or the future, to be a little abridged of life to know life, the obscure life – darkly seen.

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 look to the East for a wisdom that we shall not use - and to the sleeper for the secret that we shall not find. So, I say, what of the night, the terrible night? The darkness is the closet in which your lover roosts her heart, and that night-fowl that caws against her spirit and yours, dropping between you and her the awful estrangement of his bowels. The drip of your tears in his implacable pulse. Night people do not bury their dead, but on the neck of you, their beloved and waking, sling the creature, husked of its gestures. And where you go, it goes, the two of you, your living and her dead, that will not die; to daylight, to life, to grief, until both are carrion.

Our bones only ache while the flesh is on them. Stretch it 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 the day may be in a torment. We will find no comfort until the night melts away; until the fury of the night rots out its fire.