Djuna Barnes Quotes

…in the end you’ll all be locked together, like the poor beasts that get their antlers mixed and are found dead that way, their heads fattened with a knowledge of each other they never wanted, having had to contemplate each other, head-on and eye to eye, until death; well, that will be you and Jenny and Robin.

«Il tempo non è abbastanza lungo! [...] Non è abbastanza lungo per una vita che faccia dimenticare le sue notti.»

For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short; for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.

In the resurrection, when we come up looking backward at each other, I shall know you only of all that company.

In the passage of their lives together every object in the garden, every item in the house, every word they spoke, attested to their mutual love, the combining of their humuours. ... When the time came that Nora was alone most of the night and part of the day, she suffered from the personality of the house, the punishment of those who collect their lives together. Unconsciously at first, she went about disturbing nothing; then she became aware that her soft and careful movements were the outcome of an unreasoning fear - if she disarranged anything Robin might become confused - might lose the scent of home.

Destiny and history are untidy.

No matter where and when you meet him you feel that he has come from some place-no matter from what place he has come-some country that he has devoured rather than resided in, some secret land that he has been nourished on but cannot inherit, for the Jew seems to be everythere from nowhere.

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.

You know what man really desires?” inquired the doctor, grinning into the immobile face of the Baron. “One of two things: to find someone who is so stupid that he can lie to her, or to love someone so much that she can lie to him.

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

Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself.

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

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.

Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the 'findings' in a tomb. As in one will be charted the taken place of the body, the raiment, the utensils necessary to its other life, so in the heart of the lover will be traced, as an indelible shadow, that which he loves.

To our friends,' he answered, 'we die every day, but to ourselves we die only at the end.