Djuna Barnes Quotes

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.

For us, books have turned into fast food, to be consumed in the gaps between one bout of relentless living and the next. Airports, subways, maybe half an hour at bedtime, maybe something with the office sandwich, isn’t really ideal.

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.

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?

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

"L'amore diventa il sedimento del cuore, del tutto analogo ai "reperti" di una tomba. Come in questa si può tracciare il posto preso dal corpo, dalle vesti, dagli utensili necessari all'altra sua vita, così nel cuore dell'amante si ritrova, come un'ombra indelebile, l'impronta di ciò che ama."

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.

We wake from our doings in a deep sweat for that they happened in a house without an address, in a street in no town, citizened with people with no names with which to deny them. Their very lack of identity makes them ourselves. For by a street number, by a house, by a name, we cease to accuse ourselves. Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity. There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against our souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations.

With a tension in his stomach, such as one suffers when watching an acrobat leaving the virtuosity of his safety in a mad unraveling whirl into probable death, Felix watched the hand descend, take up the note, and disappear into the limbo of the doctor’s pocket. He knew that he would continue to like the doctor, though he was aware that it would be in spite of a long series of convulsions of the spirit, analogous to the displacement in the fluids of the oyster, that must cover its itch with a peal: so he would have to cover the doctor. 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, though originally brought on by no will of his own.

To pay homeage to our past is the only gesture that also includes the future.

Everything we can’t bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.

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

Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity. There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against our souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations.

the ballerina on perfected toe
Spins to the axis of a fortitude
That is the sum of all her yesterdays.

What turn of card, what trick of game Undiced? And you we valued still a little More than Christ.