Djuna Barnes Quotes

Have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?

Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out.

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.

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.

"Ah, mighty uncertainty!" said the doctor. "Have you thought of all the doors that have shut at night and opened again? Of women who have looked about with lamps, like you, and who have scurried on fast feet? Like a thousand mice they go this way and that, now fast, now slow, some halting behind doors, some trying to find the stairs, all approaching or leaving their misplaced mouse-meat that lies in some cranny, on some couch, down on some floor, behind some cupboard; and all the windows, great and small, from which love and fear have peered, shining and in tears. Put those windows end to end and it would be a casement that would reach around the world; and put those thousand eyes into one eye and you would have the night combed with the great blind searchlight of the heart."

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.

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

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

"Ah!" he said. "Love, that terrible thing!"

I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not ravished.

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.

"Sometimes to be utterly innocent," he went on, "would be to be utterly unknown, particularly to oneself."

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.

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

Somewhere beneath her hurried curse, A corpse lies bounding in a hearse; And friends and relatives disperse, And are not stirred.