Djuna Barnes Quotes

I also know this,’ he went on: ‘One cup poured into another makes different water; tears shed by one eye would blind if wept into another’s eye. The breast we strike in joy is not the breast we strike in pain; any man’s smile would be consternation on another’s mouth. Rear up eternal river, here comes grief! Man has no foothold that is not also a bargain. So be it! Laughing I came into Pacific Street, and laughing I’m going out of it; laughter is the pauper’s money.

She's dashed beautiful, has cat eyes and Leslie Carter hair – a loose-jointed, ball-bearing Clytie, rigged out with a complexion like creamed coffee stood overnight. They say she claws more men into her hair than any siren living or dead.

For a lover who dies, no matter how forgotten, will take somewhat of you to the grave.

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

…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.

The Catholic is the girl that you love so much that she can lie to you, and the Protestant is the girl that loves you so much that you can lie to her, and pretend a lot that you do not feel.

A Girl is gone! A Girl is lost! A simple Rustic Maiden but Yesterday swung upon the Pasture Gate, with Knowledge nowhere, yet is now, to-day, no better than her Mother, and her Mother's Mother before her! Soiled! Despoiled! Handled! Mauled! Rumpled! Rummaged! Ransacked! No purer than Fish in Sea, no sweater than Bird on Wing, no better than Beasts of Earth!

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

We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.

Pray to the good God; she will keep you. Personally I call her 'she' because of the way she made me; it somehow balances the mistake.

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.

I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.

"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.

Those who love everything, as those who love a city, in its profoundest sense, become the shame of that city, the detraques, the paupers; their good is incommunicable, outwitted, being the rudiment of a life that has developed, as in man's body are found evidences of lost needs.

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